SFB - Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

Summary:

This research project reconsiders the effects of cinematic montage from the perspective of performative theories of reception. Two concepts have emerged that are typically outside of the usual paradigms of reception in montage theory: immersion and persuasion. Both subprojects approach these research subjects as a question of a synaesthetic interaction between the performance (film screening) and the spectator. Immersion is understood as an imaginative process and persuasion as a suggestive production of meaning.

Montage theories are often understood in connection with notions of either overwhelming affective force (e.g. propaganda) or of a purely immanent generation of meaning through a semiotic chain of signs. Following the questions and results of our previous research into performative theories of film, we will conclude our project by reexaming the concept of montage through two subprojects that each develop different approaches. Subproject 1 undertakes the attempt of specifying immersion as a phenomenon of aesthetic reception that is not unilaterally the result of a technical installation or apparatus that determines perceptual and psychological responses. Instead, it is determined as much by imaginative spectatorial processes as by the technical coordinates that generate spatial effects. Thus, immersion is no longer seen as part of a technical a priori and instead presupposes the spectator's active engagement.

The goal here is to forge a more complex understanding of immersion beyond the typically limited conception of it as an a priori on the side of production aesthetics, technical determinism or subjective aesthetic experience. This starting point will allow an explanation of the phenomenon of immersion in relation to recent cinematic and digital moving images, whether mounted installations or film montages. Indeed, immersion itself can be explained as mounted, but also as centrally dependent on the spectator's complex imaginative abilities.

Subproject 2 conceives of montage as a mounted elaboration of persuasive networks. It is thus directed as well at the performatively produced understanding, that is neither based on an unambiguous propositional content nor on a "pure sensation," but instead involves a fluctuating fabrication of imaginative connections.

Both aspects depend on a model of implicit synchronization that can be understood as a performative model of action that entails "designating and letting oneself be designated,"according to Martin Seel's definition that has been important to this project.

The efforts at synchronization reside with the individual or the singular as well as in the relationship to other people and objects and in the relationships among the mounted objects themselves. Based on these hypotheses, we hope to contribute to aesthetic and reception theories of film and other moving images. To this end, we have conceived the following two subprojects:

Subproject 1: Immersive Effects of Montage (Dr. Robin Curtis)
Subproject 2: Persuasive Effects of Montage (Marc Siegel, Ph.D.)

Based on the research questions that Project B11 explored in the first granting period (2002-2004), the second period (2005-2007) focused on the significance of aisthesis in cinematic space through projects examining kinetics and color. The issue of performativity was understood as a model of action that allows for a reciprocity between self-determination and determination by an other, between the spectator's activity and the fact of being determined by the film. We will continue working with this definition.

The goal of the project is linked closely to the focus of working group II (synchronization and participation), namely to conceive of montage as a process of synchronization. Methods and techniques for the production of coherence are of central concern: the emphasis now resides on the synchronizing aspects of synaesthetic effects. How are the individual medial levels synchronized as a unity? This question has traditionally been posed in relation to montage and its effects and our research will proceed, somewhat indirectly, in this area.

The state of current research will not be thoroughly discussed here, since it predominantly concerns classical theories of montage that are not our main concern. Rather, particular aspects of these theories will be of central concern to us. Eisenstein's conceptualization of montage, specifically his notion of "overtonal montage," lends itself to a discussion of synaesthesia. The concept of the overtone that Eisenstein borrows from music theory deals precisely with the synchronous construction that emerges in the sound of a performance and that threatens to exceed fixation and notation. Overtones can technically be described as sonic phenomena whose aesthetic development unfolds in the execution of a tone. In Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, Peter Wollen confirms Eisenstein's concise conclusion that this concerns much more an "I feel" than an identitarian construction of meaning. Montage encourages exactly this subcutaneous persuasion that calls forth imagination. Outside of the field of Art History, immersive effects are primarily studied in the practical natural sciences and in engineering for their functional and practical possibilities (telerobotics, remote controlled processes in medicine and technology, for instance. In this regard, see the work of the SFB 453 at the TU Munich). In contrast to this work, we are investigating this subject in the context of aesthetic fields. For our study of the persuasive effects of montage, we are building on our own previous efforts, namely Marc Siegel's dissertation, "The Gossip of Images: Hollywood Images and Queer Counterpublics" (UCLA, 2008; Advisor: Vivian Sobchack).

Montage should also be understood in an expanded sense that is not restricted to the aesthetic aspects of production and that is well beyond the question of its rhetorical address. We conceive of montage in the performative sense of a persuasion, a suggestion, an attraction that leads to immersive effects. Both dimensions of a performative interpretation of cinematic montage have fed into the two subprojects. In them the performative force of film's synaesthetic effects will be explored in two areas of synchronizing montage.

Distinct from models of identification that are dependent on interpersonal aspects, the model of immersion allows for a stronger emphasis on intermodal perception and its extension to non-personal objects. It also opens up to analysis a dimension of the moving image that relates to the object-language character of film and its derivative media. The project director, Prof. Dr. Gertrud Koch, will explore this aspect of the project. In this context, she has offered an interdisciplinary seminar about "Things" in collaboration with the Slavic scholar Prof. Dr. Georg Witte (Summer 2006) and a lecture course on "Things and Bodies in Film"(Summer 2007). The elaboration of the area of "thing aspects" follows from our performative understanding of the model of "affordability" that Gombrich borrowed from Gibson and introduced into art analysis. This concept groups together those aspects of the representation of objects that transfer formal properties of the gestalt of things into a model of action. Gombrich's example is the bread roll dance in Chaplin's Gold Rush: Bread rolls and forks are linked in their gestalt to shoes and legs and only as such do they become involved in an imaginary dance on the table. That couldn't be accomplished with pretzels and ladles. This thing-aspect and spatially extensive dimension of things and bodies are additionally important in the context of sound/image montage, in which, for example, the experience of a discrepancy in the link between voice and body could become the object of a comic scenario (in musical comedies, for instance).

Subproject 1: Immersive Effects of Montage

The goal of this project is to designate immersion as a performative effect of a series of methods and techniques for the production of coherence. The widely understood definition of immersion presupposes both particular spatial configurations that are evoked by a film or an installation and technological characteristics of the apparatus that are presumed to instigate the spectator's activity or passivity. More appropriately, immersion seems to depend on the recipients combinational abilities or inabilities. These (in)abilities emerge out of the recipient's interaction with the aesthetic material of the "text" and thereby constitute independent relational qualities that have hitherto received too little scholarly attention. For it makes little sense to define immersion in relation to a highly limited spectrum of sense impressions (as Grau does for example). The necessity of such qualities like interaction and 360° surroundings for the recipient's complete "submergence" has been challenged in other scholarship, most notably in English-language literary studies and philosophy (Ryan, Walton, Nell). Since this work focuses on "text-based" experience, it places the recipient's imagination at the heart of the discourse on immersion.

This project will investigate the extent to which immersion can be satisfactorily understood as perceptual, physiological or apparative a priori or whether it is more accurate to consider it the result of the complex conditions of reception. In this case, the conditions presume a confrontation between textual qualities and perceptual structures—and the gaps between them—and are therefore to be understood in a performative sense. The project asks further to what extent the definition of immersion as "interactivity, " a definition viewed as widely indispensable, should instead be understood as "interpassivity"? Is that which is today widely accepted as immersion actually better described as an interplay between contemplation and distraction?

According to our working hypothesis, immersion occurs principally through two processes: first, through the combinatory abilities and effects that occur in the confrontation of multimodal perception with an aesthetic object and, second, through the complex process of empathy (Einfühlung).

1. This research project expands on the concept of the fundamental multimodality of perception (Marks, Werner) by questioning, first, how multimodal information is collected and organized in order to ask, second, what happens when the different senses clash with one another. Eisenstein's concept of montage already suggests similar intermodal, viscerally affective reception processes that are supposedly instigated by the aesthetic guidance of cinematic montage. Actually, Eisenstein's performative concept of montage is often reduced to the technical aspects of film production. An expansion of this concept is necessary in order to specify better the inherently performative side of immersion in the reception of time-based images and to draw attention to the meaning of, among other things, the formal structures of films.

2. A further source of the spectator's intense involvement will be sought in the human capacity for empathy (Einfühlung). The seldom emphasized expansiveness of the historical concept empathy (Vischer, Schmarsow, among others) proves itself to be fruitful in the case of time- based images because inanimate objects can thereby be included in the category of things with which one can immersively empathize.

Two modi that enable varied immersive experiences will be closely analyzed in the next granting period. To this end, we propose the following hypotheses:

1. A material or even entropic immersion is effected through the alternation between abstraction and concreteness that enables a non-three dimensional dissolution of cinematic spaces.

2. A haptic, surface-based immersion invokes the imagination (Scarry, Gibson) and is actually supplemental and terminal as well as anticipatory and expansive.

Subproject 2: Persuasive Effects of Montage

In his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze made the rarely noted observation that rumor is a privileged cinematic object. As performative speech acts, rumors, according to Deleuze, link groups of people with different spaces. A fleeting object that only anticipates the future of its own circulation, rumor seems independent of each of the communication contexts that emerge as a result of its spread. How can we understand Deleuze's description of this dynamic relationship between speech acts, people and spaces as cinematic? Can we argue that rumor--with its synchronization of the said or heard with the seen or perceived--is structured similarly to cinematic montage?

For this project, film and rumor will be viewed performatively, that is, as utterances that do not only represent or imagine, but also produce something. The central hypothesis of this project is that there is a structural similarity between film and rumor. To explore this claim, we will research significant issues relating to the synaesthetic effects and epistemological problems of the synchronization of speech and image in film.

The research goal is: a) a determination of the performative dimensions of montage; and b) an analysis of the synchronization of speech and image. Viewed performatively, montage is not simply a structural and aesthetic element of cinema, but is also a speculative means of drawing attention to different visible and audible elements. In doing so, film montage brings these elements together in the form of something like a conversation. According to this conceptualization of montage, the synaesthetic effects of film occur not only within the screening context, but outside the cinema as well. The subproject will therefore explore not only the synaesthetic effects of speech in film, but also those of speech about film.

Central aspects of sound/image montage in various films and film genres will be studied with a focus on their specific persuasive character and their performative effects. In this regard, we propose the following working hypotheses:

1. Performative speech acts like gossip and rumors bring together the heard and the seen in a montage structure that is similar in its temporal and synaesthetic dimensions to a film montage. In moving from the mouth of one person to the ear of another, rumors provoke an affective reaction to the information they circulate and to the imaginary world of the mental images they invoke. Since they link the heard with the seen and produce thereby a seductive bit of "hearsay," rumors may stand as a central example for the synaesthetic origins of language (Herder). Furthermore, the problematic raised by the fact of the gap between what occurred in the past, what is passed on in the present, and what is anticipated in the future lends rumor an epistemological uncertainty similar to that of the persuasive synchronization of speech and image in film. This kind of disjunctive structure is evident for example in the narrational voice in classic Hollywood melodramas and in the voiceover in many experimental films and videos,

2. Rumor will be understood as a disjunctive synchroniziation of sound and image in order to serve as an analytic schema for the consideration of cinematic montage. Research will be directed at Hollywood melodramas that incorporate the third person in the voice-over as a significant structural element of the narrative (The Barefoot Contessa, Joseph Mankiewicz, 1954; All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950; Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, 1950). Parallel to this research on commercial cinema, the project will also study experimental films and videos in which an off-screen (often questioning) voice is synchronized with the image, for instance the early sound films of Andy Warhol (Screen Test #1 and #2).

3. A performative perspective on sound/image montage enables as well an analysis of the frequent phenomenon of the retold film (for instance as a theatrical remake in German theater in the past few years). Film (and films) as the subject of rumors will therefore be an additional concern of this research project.

| oben | Projektliste | Homepage | SUCHEN | Stand: 7/02/05




	B11 Synaesthetic Effects: Montage as Synchronization
	PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Summary: This research project reconsiders the effects of cinematic montage from the perspective of performative theories of reception. Two concepts have emerged that are typically outside of the usual paradigms of reception in montage theory: immersion and persuasion. Both subprojects approach these research subjects as a question of a synaesthetic interaction between the performance (film screening) and the spectator. Immersion is understood as an imaginative process and persuasion as a suggestive production of meaning. Montage theories are often understood in connection with notions of either overwhelming affective force (e.g. propaganda) or of a purely immanent generation of meaning through a semiotic chain of signs. Following the questions and results of our previous research into performative theories of film, we will conclude our project by reexaming the concept of montage through two subprojects that each develop different approaches. Subproject 1 undertakes the attempt of specifying immersion as a phenomenon of aesthetic reception that is not unilaterally the result of a technical installation or apparatus that determines perceptual and psychological responses. Instead, it is determined as much by imaginative spectatorial processes as by the technical coordinates that generate spatial effects. Thus, immersion is no longer seen as part of a technical a priori and instead presupposes the spectator's active engagement. The goal here is to forge a more complex understanding of immersion beyond the typically limited conception of it as an a priori on the side of production aesthetics, technical determinism or subjective aesthetic experience. This starting point will allow an explanation of the phenomenon of immersion in relation to recent cinematic and digital moving images, whether mounted installations or film montages. Indeed, immersion itself can be explained as mounted, but also as centrally dependent on the spectator's complex imaginative abilities. Subproject 2 conceives of montage as a mounted elaboration of persuasive networks. It is thus directed as well at the performatively produced understanding, that is neither based on an unambiguous propositional content nor on a "pure sensation," but instead involves a fluctuating fabrication of imaginative connections. Both aspects depend on a model of implicit synchronization that can be understood as a performative model of action that entails "designating and letting oneself be designated,"according to Martin Seel's definition that has been important to this project. The efforts at synchronization reside with the individual or the singular as well as in the relationship to other people and objects and in the relationships among the mounted objects themselves. Based on these hypotheses, we hope to contribute to aesthetic and reception theories of film and other moving images. To this end, we have conceived the following two subprojects: Subproject 1: Immersive Effects of Montage (Dr. Robin Curtis) Subproject 2: Persuasive Effects of Montage (Marc Siegel, Ph.D.) Based on the research questions that Project B11 explored in the first granting period (2002-2004), the second period (2005-2007) focused on the significance of aisthesis in cinematic space through projects examining kinetics and color. The issue of performativity was understood as a model of action that allows for a reciprocity between self-determination and determination by an other, between the spectator's activity and the fact of being determined by the film. We will continue working with this definition. The goal of the project is linked closely to the focus of working group II (synchronization and participation), namely to conceive of montage as a process of synchronization. Methods and techniques for the production of coherence are of central concern: the emphasis now resides on the synchronizing aspects of synaesthetic effects. How are the individual medial levels synchronized as a unity? This question has traditionally been posed in relation to montage and its effects and our research will proceed, somewhat indirectly, in this area. The state of current research will not be thoroughly discussed here, since it predominantly concerns classical theories of montage that are not our main concern. Rather, particular aspects of these theories will be of central concern to us. Eisenstein's conceptualization of montage, specifically his notion of "overtonal montage," lends itself to a discussion of synaesthesia. The concept of the overtone that Eisenstein borrows from music theory deals precisely with the synchronous construction that emerges in the sound of a performance and that threatens to exceed fixation and notation. Overtones can technically be described as sonic phenomena whose aesthetic development unfolds in the execution of a tone. In Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, Peter Wollen confirms Eisenstein's concise conclusion that this concerns much more an "I feel" than an identitarian construction of meaning. Montage encourages exactly this subcutaneous persuasion that calls forth imagination. Outside of the field of Art History, immersive effects are primarily studied in the practical natural sciences and in engineering for their functional and practical possibilities (telerobotics, remote controlled processes in medicine and technology, for instance. In this regard, see the work of the SFB 453 at the TU Munich). In contrast to this work, we are investigating this subject in the context of aesthetic fields. For our study of the persuasive effects of montage, we are building on our own previous efforts, namely Marc Siegel's dissertation, "The Gossip of Images: Hollywood Images and Queer Counterpublics" (UCLA, 2008; Advisor: Vivian Sobchack). Montage should also be understood in an expanded sense that is not restricted to the aesthetic aspects of production and that is well beyond the question of its rhetorical address. We conceive of montage in the performative sense of a persuasion, a suggestion, an attraction that leads to immersive effects. Both dimensions of a performative interpretation of cinematic montage have fed into the two subprojects. In them the performative force of film's synaesthetic effects will be explored in two areas of synchronizing montage. Distinct from models of identification that are dependent on interpersonal aspects, the model of immersion allows for a stronger emphasis on intermodal perception and its extension to non-personal objects. It also opens up to analysis a dimension of the moving image that relates to the object-language character of film and its derivative media. The project director, Prof. Dr. Gertrud Koch, will explore this aspect of the project. In this context, she has offered an interdisciplinary seminar about "Things" in collaboration with the Slavic scholar Prof. Dr. Georg Witte (Summer 2006) and a lecture course on "Things and Bodies in Film"(Summer 2007). The elaboration of the area of "thing aspects" follows from our performative understanding of the model of "affordability" that Gombrich borrowed from Gibson and introduced into art analysis. This concept groups together those aspects of the representation of objects that transfer formal properties of the gestalt of things into a model of action. Gombrich's example is the bread roll dance in Chaplin's Gold Rush: Bread rolls and forks are linked in their gestalt to shoes and legs and only as such do they become involved in an imaginary dance on the table. That couldn't be accomplished with pretzels and ladles. This thing-aspect and spatially extensive dimension of things and bodies are additionally important in the context of sound/image montage, in which, for example, the experience of a discrepancy in the link between voice and body could become the object of a comic scenario (in musical comedies, for instance). Subproject 1: Immersive Effects of Montage The goal of this project is to designate immersion as a performative effect of a series of methods and techniques for the production of coherence. The widely understood definition of immersion presupposes both particular spatial configurations that are evoked by a film or an installation and technological characteristics of the apparatus that are presumed to instigate the spectator's activity or passivity. More appropriately, immersion seems to depend on the recipients combinational abilities or inabilities. These (in)abilities emerge out of the recipient's interaction with the aesthetic material of the "text" and thereby constitute independent relational qualities that have hitherto received too little scholarly attention. For it makes little sense to define immersion in relation to a highly limited spectrum of sense impressions (as Grau does for example). The necessity of such qualities like interaction and 360° surroundings for the recipient's complete "submergence" has been challenged in other scholarship, most notably in English-language literary studies and philosophy (Ryan, Walton, Nell). Since this work focuses on "text-based" experience, it places the recipient's imagination at the heart of the discourse on immersion. This project will investigate the extent to which immersion can be satisfactorily understood as perceptual, physiological or apparative a priori or whether it is more accurate to consider it the result of the complex conditions of reception. In this case, the conditions presume a confrontation between textual qualities and perceptual structures—and the gaps between them—and are therefore to be understood in a performative sense. The project asks further to what extent the definition of immersion as "interactivity, " a definition viewed as widely indispensable, should instead be understood as "interpassivity"? Is that which is today widely accepted as immersion actually better described as an interplay between contemplation and distraction? According to our working hypothesis, immersion occurs principally through two processes: first, through the combinatory abilities and effects that occur in the confrontation of multimodal perception with an aesthetic object and, second, through the complex process of empathy (Einfühlung). 1. This research project expands on the concept of the fundamental multimodality of perception (Marks, Werner) by questioning, first, how multimodal information is collected and organized in order to ask, second, what happens when the different senses clash with one another. Eisenstein's concept of montage already suggests similar intermodal, viscerally affective reception processes that are supposedly instigated by the aesthetic guidance of cinematic montage. Actually, Eisenstein's performative concept of montage is often reduced to the technical aspects of film production. An expansion of this concept is necessary in order to specify better the inherently performative side of immersion in the reception of time-based images and to draw attention to the meaning of, among other things, the formal structures of films. 2. A further source of the spectator's intense involvement will be sought in the human capacity for empathy (Einfühlung). The seldom emphasized expansiveness of the historical concept empathy (Vischer, Schmarsow, among others) proves itself to be fruitful in the case of time- based images because inanimate objects can thereby be included in the category of things with which one can immersively empathize. Two modi that enable varied immersive experiences will be closely analyzed in the next granting period. To this end, we propose the following hypotheses: 1. A material or even entropic immersion is effected through the alternation between abstraction and concreteness that enables a non-three dimensional dissolution of cinematic spaces. 2. A haptic, surface-based immersion invokes the imagination (Scarry, Gibson) and is actually supplemental and terminal as well as anticipatory and expansive. Subproject 2: Persuasive Effects of Montage In his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze made the rarely noted observation that rumor is a privileged cinematic object. As performative speech acts, rumors, according to Deleuze, link groups of people with different spaces. A fleeting object that only anticipates the future of its own circulation, rumor seems independent of each of the communication contexts that emerge as a result of its spread. How can we understand Deleuze's description of this dynamic relationship between speech acts, people and spaces as cinematic? Can we argue that rumor--with its synchronization of the said or heard with the seen or perceived--is structured similarly to cinematic montage? For this project, film and rumor will be viewed performatively, that is, as utterances that do not only represent or imagine, but also produce something. The central hypothesis of this project is that there is a structural similarity between film and rumor. To explore this claim, we will research significant issues relating to the synaesthetic effects and epistemological problems of the synchronization of speech and image in film. The research goal is: a) a determination of the performative dimensions of montage; and b) an analysis of the synchronization of speech and image. Viewed performatively, montage is not simply a structural and aesthetic element of cinema, but is also a speculative means of drawing attention to different visible and audible elements. In doing so, film montage brings these elements together in the form of something like a conversation. According to this conceptualization of montage, the synaesthetic effects of film occur not only within the screening context, but outside the cinema as well. The subproject will therefore explore not only the synaesthetic effects of speech in film, but also those of speech about film. Central aspects of sound/image montage in various films and film genres will be studied with a focus on their specific persuasive character and their performative effects. In this regard, we propose the following working hypotheses: 1. Performative speech acts like gossip and rumors bring together the heard and the seen in a montage structure that is similar in its temporal and synaesthetic dimensions to a film montage. In moving from the mouth of one person to the ear of another, rumors provoke an affective reaction to the information they circulate and to the imaginary world of the mental images they invoke. Since they link the heard with the seen and produce thereby a seductive bit of "hearsay," rumors may stand as a central example for the synaesthetic origins of language (Herder). Furthermore, the problematic raised by the fact of the gap between what occurred in the past, what is passed on in the present, and what is anticipated in the future lends rumor an epistemological uncertainty similar to that of the persuasive synchronization of speech and image in film. This kind of disjunctive structure is evident for example in the narrational voice in classic Hollywood melodramas and in the voiceover in many experimental films and videos, 2. Rumor will be understood as a disjunctive synchroniziation of sound and image in order to serve as an analytic schema for the consideration of cinematic montage. Research will be directed at Hollywood melodramas that incorporate the third person in the voice-over as a significant structural element of the narrative (The Barefoot Contessa, Joseph Mankiewicz, 1954; All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950; Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, 1950). Parallel to this research on commercial cinema, the project will also study experimental films and videos in which an off-screen (often questioning) voice is synchronized with the image, for instance the early sound films of Andy Warhol (Screen Test #1 and #2). 3. A performative perspective on sound/image montage enables as well an analysis of the frequent phenomenon of the retold film (for instance as a theatrical remake in German theater in the past few years). Film (and films) as the subject of rumors will therefore be an additional concern of this research project. \| oben \| Projektliste \| Homepage \| SUCHEN \| Stand: 7/02/05