DoubleQuote: Genocide Memorial Church before and after
Saturday, September 27th, 2014[ by Charles Cameron — a quick note on the DQ format used to illustrate church “before and after” attack, montage in Pudovkin / Eisenstein, and cognition ]
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ISIS have destroyed the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Deir ez-Zor http://t.co/qhpFZYC7zb pic.twitter.com/ou7JoD0mXe
— Conflict Antiquities (@conflictantiq) September 27, 2014
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Pondering these images, I see that while they do clearly represent “before and after” when juxtaposed, they do not represent “cause and effect” as such. The cause of the visible changes is not itself present, although implied. Even so, the viewer is liable to jump from a non-causal double image via the implied causal connection to an emotional response — “the bastards!” or something of that sort.
I’ve been interested in the intellectual and emotional responses generated by juxtapositions at least since I first read about montage, Pudovkin and Eisenstein in a class on film directing at UCLA some decades back. It is one of the great issues in film — Eisenstein wrote:
to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema
It’s more than that, though — it’s one of the great issues in cognition and metacognition.
We’d do well to put some bright minds on the task of understanding it.
