Abstract

The present paper addresses montage as a critical procedure, based on the thought of two filmmakers, namely Esfir Shub and Maya Deren, and articulates this approach with the artwork [Des]montagem, created through an Art Practice-Based Research (APBR) process. The work is a transmedia installation that juxtaposes documents from the period of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship of 1964. The study is grounded in the premise that montage is more than a technique of image editing; it is an aesthetic and epistemological operation that organises time and the visible.
Shub argued that montage could produce new historical and political meanings without resorting to staged images. She worked with pre-recorded materials, mainly newsreels and pre-revolutionary Russian documentary records produced between the 1910s and the First World War. She created what she herself termed the compilation film. Her techniques influenced Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin, and she is considered a precursor of the essay film. Deren, a pioneer of American experimental cinema in the 1940s, organised images, sounds, and narratives according to the logic of the anagram. She developed the concept of Vertical Cinema, proposing a poetic rather than dramatic structure, in which the viewer evokes emotions through the superimposition of images. Both established montage as a central strategy for re-signifying images and archives, leaving a fundamental legacy for cinema and contemporary art.