The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany by Patrizia C. McBride, and: Stop Reading! Look! Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book by Pepper Stetler (review)

With these two recent monographs from the University of Michigan Press, Patrizia McBride and Pepper Stetler have significantly increased our understanding of the intersection among montage, narrative, and the medium of photography as practiced in Weimar Germany. McBride traces an unorthodox conception of narrative—one that does not simply represent experience but creates it as an encounter with new forms of perception—through the theory of Weimar’s leading intellectuals and in the artwork of some of its renowned montage artists, while Stetler features a broad cross-section of photography books in the Weimar period to show how theorists and artists alike conceived of purely visual forms of communication. Both McBride’s and Stetler’s efforts are closely concerned with the status of narrative vis-à-vis the “new” media of photography and (to a lesser extent) film. McBride argues against a typical understanding of montage that sees it as a source of incoherence and disruption of narrative, instead insisting that montage practices of the 1920s and ’30s purposefully moved away from the narrative constraints of older literary forms like the novel, tied to representation and hermeneutics, to respond to new forms of human perception and experience that emerged alongside modern technologies of mechanical reproduction. Montage is understood to replace the “congruence that authorizes established representational modes [ . . . ] [with] strategies of recombination that emphasize the medium’s physical ability to directly alter the orders of the real” (11). In a very similar vein, by arguing against “literary” readings of the photographic book that have “privileged the narrative aspects” (8) of the genre, Stetler illuminates the way photobooks sought to create unique perceptual experiences through visual forms and train their viewers to see the world in a new way.

The “chatter of the visible” that forms the title of Patrizia McBride’s monograph is understood as part of the “resurfacing of the physiognomic belief that the visible surface of reality speaks to us in a language of sorts” (4). Unlike other physiognomic practices that try to divine meaning from the surface appearance of things, McBride interprets the montage practices of Dada, Constructivism, and New Objectivity as “separating the moment of perception from that of meaning in order to enlist the former in an enthralling play of forms whose dynamic exceeds the sum total of the allegorical messages the image may conjure” (5). As such, montage does not adhere to the traditional constraints of narrative in mimesis and meaning-making; rather, it seeks to harness the non-conceptual expressivity of photography and film to create forms of experience that were not feasible within the bounds of traditional literary conceptions of narrative, like those that defined the novel. Montage narrative, therefore, does not conceive of narrative and experience in a congruent way, so that representations conform to reality and impart some of reality’s deep meaning. Instead, it “refashion[s] the physiognomy of experience” (37) through the copying, duplication, relocation, and manipulation of visual forms, a type of parody that reconfigures the status of reality itself. Montage narrative does not hinge on extracting meaning through resemblance, and as such, other factors, including “the interplay between the sensory apparatus and specific technologies [like photography] and the import of a medium’s specific material qualities in the event of communication” (38) can be emphasized.

After Chapter One situates the practice of montage in the Weimar era through Dadaism, Constructivism, and New Objectivity and introduces the concepts of analogy and parody that, according to McBride, are key to the processes of montage, Chapters Two and Three trace the idea of montage in...