Montage (Eisenstein)

Montage (Eisenstein), as theorized in McGowan's account, names a specifically cinematic technique in which the overlapping of images produces a temporal and spatial surplus — the same ground traversed multiple times, by different figures, within a single sequence. This is not mere editing for narrative continuity but a deliberate formal device that makes visible something that classical cinema's illusion of seamless space would conceal: the repetitive structure of social violence and its victims occupying the same field, the same terrain, without dialectical resolution. The technique works at the level of the image's formal organization rather than its representational content, and it is precisely through this formal intervention that ideological excess — the obscene jouissance embedded in authority's exercise of force — is rendered perceptible rather than naturalized.

In McGowan's argument, Eisenstein's montage functions as a mode of cinematic fantasy that does not simply reproduce ideology but interrupts it. Fantasy, in the Lacanian sense, gives social reality its consistency by papering over the antagonism at its core; montage, by contrast, forces that antagonism into visibility through formal repetition, refusing the smooth suture that would allow the spectator to misrecognize the violence of the Cossacks as natural or inevitable. The overlapping images create an uncanny excess in the visual field — a stain that cannot be absorbed into narrative coherence — which corresponds structurally to the objet petit a that inhabits and disturbs the field of the visible. Montage thereby enacts what might be called the traversal of ideological fantasy at the level of filmic form: not by providing true knowledge in place of false, but by staging the constitutive disavowal on which the social order's self-presentation depends.

This concept appears in the-real-gaze-film-theory-afte-todd-mcgowan (p. 53) within a broader argument about early cinema's capacity to expose, rather than reinforce, ideological mystification. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts: it engages Fantasy insofar as cinematic form can either install or interrupt the fantasmatic frame that gives social reality its consistency; it engages the Gaze insofar as montage introduces a visual "stain" — an excess in the image that looks back and resists assimilation — structurally analogous to the objet petit a in the scopic field; and it engages Ideology and Fetishistic Disavowal insofar as the technique targets precisely the "I know very well, but nevertheless" structure that allows spectators to enjoy social authority's violence while disowning knowledge of it.

As an extension of McGowan's broader thesis about the Real and film, Eisenstein's montage is positioned not as naive political didacticism but as a formal operation that touches the Real by producing an irresolvable remainder — the overlapping traversal of the same ground — that ideology's smooth narrative cannot digest. This makes it a specification of cinematic fantasy's double capacity: fantasy can either screen the Real (as mainstream ideological cinema does) or, through formal distortion and repetition, expose the jouissance that ideology must constitutively disavow in order to present authority as legitimate. Montage is thus the formal mechanism by which early political cinema performs what analysis calls the traversal of fantasy — not by abolishing the image, but by pushing its structure to the point of visible excess.

The Real Gaze: Film Theory After LacanTodd McGowan · 2007 (p.53)

Eisenstein uses montage in this sequence in order to overlap images, and as a result, we see the attacking Cossacks and fleeing citizens of Odessa traverse the same ground multiple times.

The theoretical load of this passage lies in the phrase "traverse the same ground multiple times": the word "traverse" echoes the Lacanian concept of traversing the fantasy, while "multiple times" names a formal repetition that exceeds narrative necessity and produces an uncanny surplus — the very structure of jouissance that ideology must disavow and that the Gaze, as objet petit a in the visual field, embodies as an irresolvable stain.