Montage

Obviously, montage is a crucial notion for Didi-Huberman. Summoning Derrida’s “différance”, he writes that “we ought to conceive of montage as doing for the filed of images what signifying difference did for the field of language” (121). Images in the montage, then, are something like words—each image gains its meaning through its difference from other images.

He also conceives of the montage is also a way to approach a representation of something deemed unrepresentable, and mentions artists who “fiddled with the unrepresentable in every sense, so that something other than pure silence would escape from it” (125). The idea of a series of paintings as a montage was helpful for me—Goya’s “Black Paintings” (which also appeared in Histoire(s) du cinema), for instance, owe much of their nightmarish effect to the fact that together they comprise an attempt to communicate some dark impression of mankind.

I really liked the image of Shoah as a centripetal montage and Histoire(s) du cinema as a centrifrugal one. Watching the two films, it seems obvious. Shoah attempts to get at the apparently unrepresentable center by circling around it, filming the landscape where it occurred and the testimonies of witnesses. Histoire(s) du cinema, on the other hand, spins off from this center, with a lot less apparent focus and an impossibly enormous scope.

I was initially confused by his conception of the montage as “the art of making the image dialectical,” especially because he also writes that there is no dialectical culmination (138). However, Histoire(s) du cinema brought me a little closer to understanding—perhaps the effect of the two overlapping or blending images is something of a dialectic in that it produces a third image that is a visual combination of those two. The more I think about this, though, the more I feel like this might be an oversimplification.