In the last decades, especially thanks to the widespread use of affordableportable technological devices, and social networks, the obsession for producing and consuming images and moving images has concerned most of us-observers, users, prosumers, and political subjects. This fever reached an extreme level, up to the point that the massive flow of photos and videos produced exceed the lifetime of an individual. The result is that most of these audiovisuals in circulation remain without interlocutors, yet exist. Regardless they are produced by professionals or amateurs, human beings, machines, or the AI, images embody an ambivalent and contradictory sense of trustworthiness, which is often driven by emotions, despite the growing awareness of manipulations. These unreliable evidences prove that each anonymous individual is part of history, empowers self-determination through self-representation (e.g. vernacular videos), imposes the acknowledgment that multiple narratives, including fake news, can or need to co-exist, despite all. Among the possible manipulations of images, cinematic montage is one of these practices. Defined as “la pensée organizatrice/the organizing thought” by Jean-Luc Godard, by juxtaposition of visual frames and sound, the cinematic montage is intended “as the connective act of creating relations between people, objects, and ideas, is of itself a form of history.”[1] Philosopher Gilles Deleuze recognizes montage in three different phases of film creation, starting from prior to shooting to the spectator’s space. In this way, the life as it is, the life into the film, and the film’s life unfold, one into the other.[2] This perspective shows an all-encompassing and expanded approach to the act of filming and, therefore, storytelling.

It conveys also the idea that cinematic editing is a process that exceeds the mere work of juxtaposing frames, rather it is extended in times and spaces, and includes several actors, beyond the filmmakers themselves. Among these actors, there is the viewer.

In this seminar, I propose to reflect upon the cinematic montage as a game-changing tool, and to experiment practically how to challenge it. Is it possible to extend its radical potential beyond the cinematic framework? Through constructing a fiction, the montage turns into a paradigm of action. From this perspective, the seminar will develop through two main trajectories: on the one side, we’ll examine case-studies, such as audiovisuals in which different kinds of editing play crucial role in decolonizing opaque and toxic narratives, shaping the communities’ identity and the sense of belonging, reclaiming justice, destabilizing viewers’ preconceptions, breaking bias, and transforming physical spaces inside and outside the cinematic frames. Within this context, the radical narrative potential of techniques such as, re-use, mesh-up of found footage, and memes will be explored.

On the other side, focusing on our creative and active role as spectators, we’ll look at leftovers, meaning all those photos and videos that for political and social reasons remained unseen, abandoned, marginalized, discriminated, orphaned. The purpose of the workshop is to question whether these audiovisuals need to be rescued from loss, and why they deserve to be seen. Controversial archives such as the internet, the social networks, and other systems of rules, will be some of the privileged sources of research.

As part of the seminar, the students may have the opportunity to attend a short workshop for learning basic knowledge of video and sound editing, held by Sarah Oh-Mock and Daniel Windisch (Kunsthochschule Weißensee). More details will be confirmed soon.

The seminar will revolve around the above mentioned trajectories, which will be explored through tasks assigned to the students, individual researches, readings that will be discussed and analysed collectively, reflections upon the case-studies proposed, as well as outdoor experiences, such as group visits to exhibitions, and studio visits with artists. The seminar aims to be a shared space where students are committed to developing and progressing their individual artistic practices, and will benefit from regular collective presentations, and exchanges with the entire group.

[1] James S. Williams, Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics (New York: SUNY Press, 2016), 10.

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 60.