Overlapping montage: a comparative study of mainstream film and moving-image installations

This dissertation develops a discussion on the need for a comparative approach to the study of film and moving- image installations. It addresses the lack of critical attention given to moving-image installations within film studies generally and academic teaching programmes in particular. The development of a comparative approach requires researching a number of interlinking and independent fields of study such as film studies, art history/criticism, photography, literary theory, critical theory, anthropology and philosophy. While arguing against traditional disciplinary boundaries, the discussion critiques the accepted articulations of current interdisciplinary approaches. The dissertation discusses how an expanded field of comparative film studies needs to concern itself with both diachronic and synchronic axes, requiring a longer historical framework to analyse shifts in technologies of representation and related theories of subjectivity within particular capitalist formations. It is argued that this type of comparative model elaborates a more critically productive and conceptually expansive discussion of cultural products, whether they are mainstream film or moving-image installations. As such it aligns itself with an awareness of the political importance of history, memory and personal experience. The theoretical ground for a comparative approach is developed through exploring montage and fragmentation. While articulating the significance of theories of fragmentation to discussions of modernity and modernism, the thesis foregrounds the significance of understanding all cultural production as ‘montages’ - as elaborations of a number of competing discourses, both when they are made and when they are read. A reconceptualization of montage as a dominant component in cultural meaning making moves away from montage as an aesthetics of form. Rather than understanding film and moving-image installations as rigidly delineated objects, they are explored through hybridity and overlap, for example through the multiple scopic regimes, which shape and form them. In this enterprise, the significance of an anthropological materialist’ approach to cinema and moving-image installations is articulated as a means of developing a critical cognitive engagement with our varied cultural and ever changing social environment