A new twenties: Notes on Instagram and the return of the centrality of montage and slapstick in contemporary moving image

Abstract

According to many early film theorists, the novelty and aesthetic potential of film was based on montage – something which lost its edge when film was taken over by the ‘talkie’ in the late 1920s. Theorists of the 1920s also accentuated the originality of slapstick as a form of expression. These days an incredible number of clips with moving images circulate in social media, often based on slapstick, but even more on not just montages made by the people who make these films, but also the machinery itself which distributes and cuts together this spectacle. Have we not somehow entered into a situation which seems to call for a look at the last 20s? Have we now suddenly realized the old potential of film which e.g. Gilbert Seldes, Henry Parland and Sergey Eisenstein wrote about?