Artistic montage, as discussed by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Kluge, deals with questions regarding the relationship between individual elements, especially with respect to images and scenes. In radical montage, the respective components often point beyond their specific material substrate to some sort of socio-philosophical or historical constellation.

There is a now quite famous moment in Les Blank’s documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, in which the narrator quotes the German director as stating that, “Everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Not a bad slogan for a modernist program . . .

Politically, melancholia may be more destructive than idealism, but aesthetically, doesn’t melancholia, as a kind of negative idealism, seem almost natural?

C. Philip Mills reviews Skinamarink

For moderns, art is the appearance of suffering from the unrealized potential of freedom, i.e., the appearance of freedom’s task.

“The category of experience connects original composition to translation. Just as poets shape their experience into a poem, the translator shapes a more specific experience, the experience of the original poem, into the translation.”

“Critique is an exploration of conditions of possibility for freedom in transformation.”

n+1 Editor Marco Roth responds to Caesura’s Issue 0 prompt.