Page 118 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 118
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
reality, which becomes more real rather than a forever-lost “external reali-
ty” by virtue of the virtual.
For example, the works of Sophie Calle, who invested much of her dai-
ly life in self-presenting her life’s experiences through a de-montage of var-
ious media, writing, images, films, and outcomes of unusual communi-
cations, signalled a future – which is the present now – of wild hybridism
and all kinds of narratives, accomplished through mixing different gen-
res. I propose a slight addition to the notion of montage in the case of these
new kinds of narratives, and I refer to them as montage-collage, which inte-
grates opposite principles of montage and de-montage. The indicative case,
which already causes some serious theoretical pondering, is a re-enactment
of autobiography, preferably in the form of a diary. One such case is quite
a complex internet site, which presents the Journal d’Ariane Grimm, con-
sisting of pictures of written pages, small films, blogs, fiction and “auto-fic-
tion,” and links the Journal to reflections on these activities by Philippe Le-
jeune (a university expert in autobiography).7 The site contains a true-life
drama because the writer of the journals, Ariane Grimm, died in a motor-
cycle accident in 1985 and now her journals and a number of ongoing activi-
ties around them are managed by Ariane’s mother, Gisèle Grimm. The case
in point triggers an investigation into whether it is necessary to deal with
some new literary form, perhaps another form of novel, a montage-collage
that is named Un roman de soi? One might say that many Facebook users
as well as users of some less popular internet-based social networks are al-
ready actually doing the same thing. The Facebook universe is a vast world
of montage-collage, in which there is space for construction of diverse iden-
tities, for presenting real and totally invented stories of real or pretend-
ed “selves”, for unbridled narcissism, and for many other types of self-ex-
posure. Dadaistic and New sobriety ideas of art joined to 21st Century daily
life come true in an unexpected media – probably not exactly in accord-
ance with the original Dada idea. Even a trace of epic form could be de-
tected, the epic of leisure time incorporated in the system of vast exchang-
es of imaginary attributes of objects as pictures, small films, and more or
less irrelevant statements. Nonetheless, such media proved to be a work-
ing tool in cases of the public unrest of the 2010s from Tunisia and Egypt to
7 See http://www.arianegrimm.net/pages/sommaire.html (Accessed: 13th October
2016). My claim that this internet phenomenon raises interesting theoretical ques-
tions is based on an oral presentation at the Nineteenth International Congress of
Aesthetics in Krakow (22–27 July 2013) on 25 July 2013 by Okubo Miki: “The Actu-
ality of Writing and the Mode of Self-Narrative.”
116
reality, which becomes more real rather than a forever-lost “external reali-
ty” by virtue of the virtual.
For example, the works of Sophie Calle, who invested much of her dai-
ly life in self-presenting her life’s experiences through a de-montage of var-
ious media, writing, images, films, and outcomes of unusual communi-
cations, signalled a future – which is the present now – of wild hybridism
and all kinds of narratives, accomplished through mixing different gen-
res. I propose a slight addition to the notion of montage in the case of these
new kinds of narratives, and I refer to them as montage-collage, which inte-
grates opposite principles of montage and de-montage. The indicative case,
which already causes some serious theoretical pondering, is a re-enactment
of autobiography, preferably in the form of a diary. One such case is quite
a complex internet site, which presents the Journal d’Ariane Grimm, con-
sisting of pictures of written pages, small films, blogs, fiction and “auto-fic-
tion,” and links the Journal to reflections on these activities by Philippe Le-
jeune (a university expert in autobiography).7 The site contains a true-life
drama because the writer of the journals, Ariane Grimm, died in a motor-
cycle accident in 1985 and now her journals and a number of ongoing activi-
ties around them are managed by Ariane’s mother, Gisèle Grimm. The case
in point triggers an investigation into whether it is necessary to deal with
some new literary form, perhaps another form of novel, a montage-collage
that is named Un roman de soi? One might say that many Facebook users
as well as users of some less popular internet-based social networks are al-
ready actually doing the same thing. The Facebook universe is a vast world
of montage-collage, in which there is space for construction of diverse iden-
tities, for presenting real and totally invented stories of real or pretend-
ed “selves”, for unbridled narcissism, and for many other types of self-ex-
posure. Dadaistic and New sobriety ideas of art joined to 21st Century daily
life come true in an unexpected media – probably not exactly in accord-
ance with the original Dada idea. Even a trace of epic form could be de-
tected, the epic of leisure time incorporated in the system of vast exchang-
es of imaginary attributes of objects as pictures, small films, and more or
less irrelevant statements. Nonetheless, such media proved to be a work-
ing tool in cases of the public unrest of the 2010s from Tunisia and Egypt to
7 See http://www.arianegrimm.net/pages/sommaire.html (Accessed: 13th October
2016). My claim that this internet phenomenon raises interesting theoretical ques-
tions is based on an oral presentation at the Nineteenth International Congress of
Aesthetics in Krakow (22–27 July 2013) on 25 July 2013 by Okubo Miki: “The Actu-
ality of Writing and the Mode of Self-Narrative.”
116
