Author Description

Between Images proposes a unique theory of montage a technique of relation: a means of fundamentally rethinking and reshaping how humans relate-to ourselves and each other, to the material world, to the planet and its nonhuman inhabitants. Historically, film criticism has cast montage in one of several roles: as narrative's invisible executor of spatiotemporal continuity to maintain the viewer's investment in the story-world; as an agent of disorder that confounds conventions of storytelling and realism and prompts the viewer's intellectual engagement; and as an expressionistic device for augmenting the duration and combination of shots to affect viewers at a sensory level. While not exactly abandoning such accounts, this study tries to move closer to the heart of montage by distinguishing the space between images as itself a powerful source of ideas, feelings, and forms. Venturing into an expanded field of montage beyond the limited purview of a given film's editing, Between Images traces the cut and the splice across photographic and cinematic media in a range of material, conceptual, and political contexts. In all of this, the space between images becomes a setting for navigating and renegotiating the terms of relation, of the being-with that connects all forms of life. Between Images brings together a diverse cast of experimental filmmakers, including Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl, Steve McQueen, and Cauleen Smith, Daïchi Saito, and Ja'tovia Gary, and in doing so, situates the cinematic.