Montage in European Culture as Montage in Cinema and Art

Abstract

The article presents a comparative approximation of the montage of culture and Europe with the process of montage in the visual arts. The article includes questions about the effects of montage applied in this way: is it a mixing, transplantation, a smooth transition from image to image or is it the law of attraction-repulsion that will create a flexible movement of connection or disconnection between European cultures? The method consists in identifying structures and models: topological – according to the movement of tectonic plates that break and find each other; linguistic – the Tower of Babel with a single language and human unity; or aesthetic – the operational model of montage in the arts, such as the one taken by various artists speaking of “national vegetable gardens” (K. Malevitch) or by L. de Vinci and S. M. Eisenstein, very close in their concepts and drawings. The body of the work is based on the history of art and on the texts of the artists. The analysis of works and the recall of numerous texts constitute montage in themselves. The problem is to observe the flexible relation of connection and distance, and then to check whether an aesthetic model such as montage is applicable to an artificial construction such as culture in Europe, which is itself a unifying montage.