Page 105 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 105
The Principle of Montage and Literature1
“Real montage is based on the document” (Benjamin, 1991: p. 232). What
does Benjamin mean by this sentence? This statement is a singular no-
tional crystallization in the intersection between literature and film, and
it emerged in the context of a specific encounter between Walter Benja-
min as a theoretician and Alfred Döblin as a writer. Benjamin’s sentence
was articulated as part of his review of Döblin’s novel, which was quite
over-ambitiously titled “The Crisis of the Novel.” What are the attributes of
the “document” that determines montage? Definitions of the word docu-
ment (which originated in thirteenth-century France) in various dictionar-
ies more or less consistently relate writing to terms such as evidence, proof,
and reality. Considering the entire intellectual milieu of the Weimar Re-
public, in which the novel was written and published, Benjamin’s use of
the term document should be read as a semantic link to the notion of real-
ity within Neue Sachlichkeit2 movement and to the connotations of film as
an art that has a strong impact on reality. Hence, film is a “document” that
has a special power to represent or modify objective reality. One should
1 This chapter is derived from the article, published as: Štrajn, Darko. The principle of
montage and literature: fragmented subjectivity as the subject-matter in novel, film
and in digital forms of narration. In: Zorman, Barbara (ed.), Vaupotič, Aleš (ed.). Lit-
eratura in gibljive slike: tematski sklop = Literature and moving images: thematic sec-
tion, (Primerjalna književnost, ISSN 0351-1189, year 37, 2). pp. 39-53.
2 The most common English translations of this movement’s name are New Objectiv-
ity or New Sobriety.
103
“Real montage is based on the document” (Benjamin, 1991: p. 232). What
does Benjamin mean by this sentence? This statement is a singular no-
tional crystallization in the intersection between literature and film, and
it emerged in the context of a specific encounter between Walter Benja-
min as a theoretician and Alfred Döblin as a writer. Benjamin’s sentence
was articulated as part of his review of Döblin’s novel, which was quite
over-ambitiously titled “The Crisis of the Novel.” What are the attributes of
the “document” that determines montage? Definitions of the word docu-
ment (which originated in thirteenth-century France) in various dictionar-
ies more or less consistently relate writing to terms such as evidence, proof,
and reality. Considering the entire intellectual milieu of the Weimar Re-
public, in which the novel was written and published, Benjamin’s use of
the term document should be read as a semantic link to the notion of real-
ity within Neue Sachlichkeit2 movement and to the connotations of film as
an art that has a strong impact on reality. Hence, film is a “document” that
has a special power to represent or modify objective reality. One should
1 This chapter is derived from the article, published as: Štrajn, Darko. The principle of
montage and literature: fragmented subjectivity as the subject-matter in novel, film
and in digital forms of narration. In: Zorman, Barbara (ed.), Vaupotič, Aleš (ed.). Lit-
eratura in gibljive slike: tematski sklop = Literature and moving images: thematic sec-
tion, (Primerjalna književnost, ISSN 0351-1189, year 37, 2). pp. 39-53.
2 The most common English translations of this movement’s name are New Objectiv-
ity or New Sobriety.
103
