Montage is a process through which
modern artists were able to cut out pieces of
the reality and to establish new links between
them in order to reinvent the reality and to
create new relationships, juxtapositions and
meanings. The juxtaposition of two pieces
which can not have any relation in terms of
spatial and temporal dimensions gives the
audience a shock and invites him to engage
in the meaning-making process. For the
prominent filmmaker of the Soviet Cinema,
Sergei Eisenstein, montage had something
far beyond its mere technical sense. Realizing
the inherent affinity between montage and the
spatial/temporal fragmentation and chaos of
modern metropolis, he introduced montage as
an efficient tool for capturing the experience
of modernity. Montage transformed the
traditional concepts of body/space relation,
and gave cinema the ability to fragment
space, time and human body to pieces. Lev
Kuleshov was one of the first and most
important directors who by dismembering
the different parts of human bodies, spaces
and landscapes, and then by combining and
giving the arbitrary structure to them, created
an illusion of continuity, and invented his own
cinematic “artificial landscape” and “creative
geography”. The term “creative geography”,
has an obvious implication to rooted liaison
between the film theory and the physical
environment, and also considering the body
as a landscape in montage theory. Montage
has provided this opportunity for filmmakers
to form their own cinematic city by
dismembering and mutilating of space, time
and the human body, and establishing a new
link between them, and inviting the spectator
to walk in spaces of this cinematic city.
Directors utilized real locations for shaping
their own filmic topography and encouraged
the audience to imagine the geography of this
reel city by inventing their own mental map.
In cinematic city, however, because of fusing
indoor and outdoor spaces, a kind of spatial
fluidity emerges, and conventional sense
of division between street / house, public /
private is disappeared. In this eccentric city,
the human body is converted to a kind of
landscape, a strange territory. Referring to
interaction between the audience’s body and
the spaces of the cinematic city, Giuliana
Bruno emphasizes that the boundaries of
the body and city getting intermingled and
flowing into each other. In this filmic scape,
an intense desire will be emerged within the
viewer because of his/her intertwining with
these cinematic fragments. The audience’s
body as an embodied subject in the film’s
haptic space, constantly is exposed to
mutilation and disintegration, because of
momentary decomposition and explosion
of filmic spaces and bodies. The spectator’s
fragmented body blends with dismembered bodies and fragmented spaces of the film, and
their combination brings forward a space that
can be called the intertwining geography of
dismembered bodies and fragmented spaces.
Ghahramani M B, Piravi Vanak M, Mazaherian H, Sayyad A. Intertwining Geography of Dismembered Bodies and Fragmented Spaces in cinematic City. کیمیای هنر 2015; 3 (13) :59-72 URL: http://kimiahonar.ir/article-1-309-en.html