Patrizia C. McBride: The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (2016)

“The Chatter of the Visible examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photo montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized reappraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photo montage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it—a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres).

McBride’s contribution to the conversation around Weimar-era montage is in her situation of the form of the work as a discursive practice in its own right, which affords humans a new way to negotiate temporality; as a particular mode of thinking that productively relates the particular to the universal; or as a culturally specific form of cognition.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0
ISBN 9780472053032, 0472053035
x+236 pages

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

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Fritz Neumeyer: The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art (1986/1991)

“Mies van der Rohe’s architecture has been well documented, yet his writings, which contain the key to understanding his work, have been largely unexplored. From a body of writing that is surprisingly large for the self-described “unwilling author,” Fritz Neumeyer reconstructs the metaphysical and philosophical inquiry on which Mies based his modernism.

An appendix presents all of the essential texts by Mies, including some that have not previously appeared in English. Of special interest is the manuscript notebook from the Mies van der Rohe Archive in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, dating from the crucial years 1927-28 and published for the first time in this book.”

First published as Mies van der Rohe. Das kunstlose Wort. Gedanken zur Baukunst, Siedler, Berlin, 1986.

Translated by Mark Jarzombek
Publisher MIT Press, 1991
ISBN 0262140470
xxii+386 pages

WorldCat

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Volker Pantenburg: Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (2006/2015)

“There is a tension between the requirements of theoretical abstraction and the capacities of the film medium, where everything that we see on screen is concrete: A train arriving at a station, a tree, bodies, faces. Since the complex theories of montage in Soviet cinema, however, there have continuously been attempts to express theoretical issues by combining shots, thus creating a visual form of thinking.

This book brings together two major filmmakers-French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and German avant-gardist Harun Farocki to explore the fundamental tension between theoretical abstraction and the capacities of film itself, a medium where everything seen onscreen is necessarily concrete. Volker Pantenburg shows how these two filmmakers explored the potential of combined shots and montage to create ‘film as theory’.”

First published as Film als Theorie. Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc Godard, transcript, Bielefeld, 2006.

Translated by Michael Turnbull
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Film Culture in Transition series
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9789089648914
285 pages

Reviews: Dietmar Kammerer (taz.de, 2006, DE), Toni Hildebrandt (Senses of Cinema, 2015), Alex Fletcher (Review31, 2015), Chiara Marchini (Medienwissenschaft, 2016).

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

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