Montage as the Meaning-generative Principle of Avant-garde: From Montage in Cinema to Montage in Theatre (Soviet and Post-Soviet Theatre and Cinema)
Abstract
The principle of montage was a discovery of the avant-garde that is still widely used in modern culture. The article discusses how montage from a technique applied in early cinematography came to play a crucial role in organization of various texts produced by different arts, in particular, theatre. The avant-garde art strove to transform daily life and the montage principle was inextricably linked to these value orientations. This research analyzes the potential of montage as a meaning-generative mechanism in avant-garde films and theatre performances in the 1920s and 1930s. This principle gained significance for theatre in the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century. The article investigates the connections between Soviet avantgarde theatre and cinema and explores the reasons why the interest to the montage principle was revived in Yury Lubimov’s theatre and in the post-dramatic theatre of Dmitry Krymov.
Keywords: avant-garde; montage; postdrama; Dziga Vertov; Vsevolod Meyerhold; Dmitry Krymov; Yury Lubimov; Sergey Eisenstein
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