There is an image70 which continually came to my mind as I developed the double-image montage of the film-essay, acting as a prompt for my editing approach. It is a photograph of a person in a museum, standing in front of the cross-section of a tree-trunk, looking at the growth rings. The image shows a double set of proportions. The tree trunk is evidence of centuries of aging, preserved in the layers of rings. The person standing upright in front of it looks small. The length of the person’s life has not yet been decided, but it will not be able to compete with that of the tree. Often, when they are exhibited, the growth rings of tree trunks are marked with dates, and sometimes particular historical events are attached to particular rings. Standing in front of the overwhelming concentric volume (of time), the ‘round timeline’ added in this way seems to offer something to hold onto in the face of the dizzyingly great age of the trees. A typical gesture by visitors is to point at a certain ‘year’ in order to make a connection (e.g. “Here I was born”71). But the timeline marked on the tree seems only to be a means of drawing attention away from another obvious dimension: transience.72 Faced with the body of the giant tree, our own lifetime is relativized. Nor can this be obscured by the fact that the tree has been felled and marked by human rationality. The tree remains evidence of constancy and flexibility. It is not merely the idea of a person realizing her own modest lifespan on seeing the awe-inspiring age of the tree which interests me in this picture, but the visceral effect of the two temporalities being embodied and juxtaposed: in this, I recognize an existential moment of consciousness which can spark an inner attunement to the moment which I describe as ‘tuning into time’, in the sense of a situation of active and broadened perception of heterogeneous temporalities.
How can temporal volumes be evoked on film? And how can heterogeneous temporalities trigger an existential moment? How can a comparative approach to montage make things visible which would otherwise remain hidden? Harun Farocki coined the term “soft montage”73 as an epistemic approach. Rather than only presenting images in succession, in soft montage an image is joined by a further image, simultaneously side by side. “Two-dimensional juxtaposition is replaced by a three-dimensional model of comparison,”74 as Eva-Maria Gillich and Helga Lutz explain, referring to the multisensory connections which open up when we view multi-channel video.75 In this kind of montage, it is no longer the connection between two images which is supposed to speak; instead, the combining of images is meant as a specific approach that “allows the material to speak.”76 As Farocki reflects in the voiceover of Schnittstelle, his first two-channel video installation (1995), the combination of one image with another is a form of comment. Depending on which dyad emerges, the meaning is changed by simultaneity, and with that also the interpretation of one image in relation to the other. Such processual recognition arises from the material itself.77 In terms of production aesthetics, it is only in the act of putting it together and experimenting that something can be seen. This ‘seeing together’ has to take place again and again; it is a form of seeing which cannot be recorded but which ‘only’ produces insights performatively.
Seeing more than one image simultaneously clarifies the potential of cinematic thinking as a form which thinks.78 As soon as more than one image can be seen at the same time, the triangulation between the connections between images and the seeing-thinking person is brought more consciously into the foreground. When Jean-Luc Godard says that the film itself thinks,79 he also makes clear that editing as a kind of ‘thinking by doing’ does not only belong on the production side, but is also carried out by viewers. This therefore also involves a kind of seeing which, rather than recognizing and equating things with each other, actively brings them together and into conflict with each other. Volker Pantenburg calls this relational or comparative seeing:
“Only the combination of two images, of two perspectives on something, develops a relationship that can be seen as a flexible triangle in which the viewer defines the third point alongside the two images. ‘[W]hen people saw a film there was something that was at least double – and when someone watched it became triple. […] It was something that filmed not things, but the connection between things […]. Meaning that people saw connections in them.’”80
If we see film as a Denkraum [D], then it is not a means of communication but the medium and material for an open montage which only becomes a thinking form through the active participation of recipients. Unlike a linear film in full-screen mode, where time is ordered progressively (which might also include flashbacks, jumps between time periods, etc.), the simultaneity of the double image montage enables an experience of time which I would describe as temporal volume. While the first form of temporal perception draws viewers in and immerses them in such a way that they forget themselves (and also often forget about time), in the second form of temporal perception we find ourselves confronted with a temporal accumulation which constantly demands that we behave in a certain way, e.g. by directing our gaze at one image or the other, or by concentrating on the fact that our attention is being divided. From single-channel to two-channel video, the way we perceive temporalities shifts: seeing and remembering remains important as a mental process of placing things on a timeline (before-after), but through simultaneity a physical and spatial demand is foregrounded (eye movements, head movements). Different temporal volumes are juxtaposed, and something happens to our perception of proportions. In contrast with classic montage, comparative montage incorporates our awareness of the viewing situation and of ourselves. In this process of placing things in relation to each other, we are required to ‘tune into time’.
To return to the analogy of the tree cross-section: I tried to use this image to demonstrate two levels of double-image montage which can call forth an experience of ‘tuning into time’, i.e. a confrontation with our own lifespan and with transience. Firstly through the fact that the montage reveals how the material has ‘grown’, i.e. its emergence over time is marked both by dates given in the voiceover and by visual time transitions: over the period of slightly more than three years in which I filmed at the observation locations, the passage of time is inevitably perceptible in the footage through visible changes.81 Secondly, through the whole lifespan – from pregnancy, childhood to the slow goodbye of dementia –, which the film-essay unfurls in our minds through the fragmentary montage of the case studies. Looked at from the ‘margins’ of a lifetime (the beginning and end of life), which are intertwined through the double-image montage, the viewer seems ‘small’ in a certain way.
The two levels of temporal volume are formed explicitly – over the length of the film – only through the comparative, relational seeing of the viewer. However, a few moments in the film-essay are also recognizable as concrete examples of temporal layers due to specific pairs of images, and in their simultaneity, analogously to the tree cross-section, these moments create a form of temporal cross-section. One example is the sequence with two shots of the same place, the camera panning across the landscape at two visibly different times of year [W is for Weather, for Wind]. In a classic montage, these would form an ellipse in which one image fades into the other, making the passage of time legible in the language of film. Instead, in this sequence of the film-essay, there is no fade between the two different points in time, but the viewer is faced with the ellipse in the simultaneity of the images shown side by side.
A further explicit moment of temporal volume which works analogously to the tree cross-section comes about in the sequence on what is still the school campus of the École Internationale: here, we hear the narrator speaking about the tree which was already in the school yard when Maya Deren went to school there [M is for Morning Gymnastics]. While in the righthand image our gaze travels slowly along the thick trunk, upwards into the crown of the cedar, in the lefthand image a woman moves into the place in front of the school building, precisely where Maya Deren stood in the center of the class photo taken in 1931 (shown earlier in the film).
