A L Rees - A History of Experimental Film and Video

· The avant garde both rejects and critiques the mainstream entertainment cinema and the audience responses which flow from it (1)

· Resistance to ‘normal vision’ (6)

· The continuous flow of images which editing permits, and which is the basis of dramatic illusionism in film, is in contrast to the equal power of film editing to enforce breaks and interruption in that flow. (34)

· Editing draws out the disjunction between shots rather than their continuity, a technique purued in man rays other films (43)

· Many rays films also oppose passive ‘visual pleasure’ and the viewers participation. In Emak Bakia montage is used to slow down or to repeat actions and objects which both invite and defy thematic connection. (44)

· This discontinuity principle underlies the avant-gardes key rhetorical figure, paratactic montage, which breaks the flow, or ‘continuity’, between shots and scenes, against the grain or narrative editing, (49)

· Against the grain of realism, montage-editing evokes swift transitions in space and time (58)

· At the same time, the manipulation of time and space was equally a property of film form, so that editing could undermine the surface realism of cinematography to create a new language that was films alone. (59)

I like Rees' conception of the avant-garde as something that rejects norms, whether that be temporal, narrative, spacial or continuity. Reading this in conjunction with Eisenstein's theory of montage helped me to situate the idea of montage within current video art practices which in turn helped me to understand Eisenstein. Usually if I have ever made montages in the past I see them purely as an aesthetic choice that is often just a lazy way to speed up the story. However, after reading these two texts creating my own montage in class inspired me a lot more and I potentially want to take some of these ideas further.