In his essay “The Dramaturgy of Film Form,” Sergei Eisenstein almost preaches the values of montage in creating meaning. In class we saw the value of this beautifully exemplified in an educational film on editing. This broke down four shots of the famous “Odessa Steps” sequence. The first shot (A) was of a baby in a carriage. The second (B) is a medium close-up shot of one of the soldiers making a downward slashing motion. We retrospectively read this as the solider cutting the child with what we presume to be a sword. The third shot is essentially the same as the B (the solider slashing), yet this time the shot is a full close-up, so we’ll call this shot B2. When first confronted with B2, it is read as a repetition of the action: the solider continues to attack the child. Yet B2 is followed by shot C, which begs a similar relation: a close-up of a bleeding face. Again we read this retrospectively: the bleeding face has just been hit by the solider. We read the same action (the soldier slashing) as existing in two simultaneous but separate settings because they are paired within different contexts. The conflict between the first pair creates meaning and the conflict between the second pair creates a different meaning entirely. Both share one image but create different implication: this is the Kuleshov effect expanded upon – toying with the memory of the former meaning in relationship to the most recent meaning - the recognition of repetition.
Rea Tajiri’s experimental documentary, “History and Memory,” takes advantage of this element of montage. Through the course of her film, she uses often two clips – neither the type the layperson expects in a documentary. The first is the abstract reenactment of the woman filling a canteen (presumably her mother or grandmother). The other, which more particularly interests me, is a clip from the black and white period of Hollywood: a couple walking through a train. The woman, walking ahead of the man, says “Why to they have all the blinds down?” and the man, disgruntled, replies, “It’s because they don’t want the people to see where they are going.” At first it seems to simply provide an out-of-context reenactment that can fill in for an un-filmable occurrence in history (an idea which Tajiri is clearly interested in) that Hollywood firms in our social memory. In the mixed media age we live in, we take it for granted that filmic images can be used as such: nothing more and nothing less than a montage cell that acts to set a mood or even just to provide a minute of film time in which the voice-over can make a point.
But it is in the repetition of this montage cell through the evolution of our film-comprehension that the clip reaches its full potential to toy with memory. Originally the footage functions darkly as a comic relief – an ambiguous and disassociated clip that one reads as additive to the tone but not in the least directly associated to the plot in real history. It is only 3/4th into the film that Tajiri informs the viewer that this clip is actually from a Hollywood film directly related to her subject. We then understand the complexity of her allusion to the film. Instead of just one more moment in which the montage creates an over parallel between Nazi Concentration Camps and the so called “Internment Camps” in the US, the revelation that the clip is from a Hollywood movie suggests a connection between the collective memory of the US and it’s entertainment industry. We then think back onto the first moment the clip was introduced to us: set within the context of personal memory. This historically relevant clip gains a new, more accessible dimension by using it first under sentimental rational and secondly under historical rational. Thus the clip functions with a similar duality as the “B” shot functions in the Odessa Steps sequence – first creating one meaning and another simultaneous and opposing. The two meanings together form a holistic view of an event that is unattainable without such repetition.
