We begin with Jesse Matz’s paper, “Montage Diversity in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” In the film’s famous establishing montage sequence, Jimmy Stewart takes a reverential tour of the city’s historical monuments, his awed face superimposing over shifting views of America’s built majesty. But this sequence ends with other faces: those of an elderly black man and a Jewish grandfather. Their reverence for Abraham Lincoln fits the scene, but not entirely, since montage enables the film to include them while also keeping them separate from Mr. Smith’s experience. This combination is typical of a common approach to representing the American public at once together and apart. It is a leading example of montage diversity, which brings to film as well as many other cultural forms (advertising, literary realism, corporate public relations) a representational mode capable of special engagement with diversity’s dynamics. In Mr. Smith, it ventures a kind of inclusiveness new to New Deal America, performing the kind of diversity promoted through—but also limited by—the projects of the Public Works Administration in their larger social and economic contexts. Matching this cultural profile was the mixed character of montage itself, developed in this instance by the European avant-garde film-maker turned Hollywood editor Slavko Vorkapich. Vorkapich promoted a form of montage that could suit avant-garde principles to the needs of Hollywood filmmaking. His montage sequences for this and other 1930s Hollywood films were at once dialectical and economical, kinaesthetic and sentimental, and they helped provide the combination of effects essential to the practice and the politics of montage diversity.
Simultaneously, the Spanish Civil War created opportunities for feminist war coverage never before seen in the twentieth century. From Gerda Taro’s photographs of milicianas—Spanish militia women—training with guns on beaches, to the African-American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion who inspired Langston Hughes, the war was a transnational, global modernist event. Recovering Hungarian Kati Horna’s spectacular
photographic representations of war, Laura Hartmann-Villalta argues in her paper, “Surrealism, Feminist Resistance, and the Spanish Civil War,” that montage in still photography, layered with surrealist techniques such as superimposition, reveals unexpected insights about the war, modernism, and the possibilities for women’s artistic production in both. Trained in the Bauhaus school, Horna uses technical methods such as superimposition and the layering of photographs to create photomontages, defying the representations of space and time typically found in war photography. These Surrealist techniques, combined with the subjects (women and wounded war victims), complicates our understanding of montage as a technology of diversity in the late modernist era, even as Horna experiments with the two concepts. Unlike her war photographer counterparts, Horna turned her camera’s eye away from the war front and to the home front, and in doing so, crafted a Surrealist approach to war representations informed by a feminist critical viewpoint.
Moving from war in 1930s Europe to late seventies Britain, Sejal Sutaria turns to consider how we can contextualize Radio Four programs remembering the Raj within what Stuart Hall identifies as a rise in indigenous racism unleashed upon immigrants from former colonies. Born of Britain’s anxiety about its diminishing clout following decolonization and an urgency to restore Britain’s “greatness,” such attitudes were further stoked by Thatcher and the Torys. In her paper, “BBC Radio Four Remembers the Raj: Strategic Sound Montage and Constructing Reconciliation,” Sutaria examines how the 1977 radio program entitled The Crown and the Lotus employs sound montage techniques—Introduced by renowned radio producer Michael Mason—to accomplish its stated intention to explain why “two nations set 6000 miles apart” should “be so bound together in love and hate.” As David Hendy and Asa Briggs explain, Mason aimed to transmit historical events through sonic layering of voices, music, and sound effects that would evoke place and cause listeners to feel as though they were experiencing them in real time. Accordingly, the program integrates excerpts from BBC commissioned interviews of British and Indian officials recollecting colonial rule and reflecting upon its aftermath with backdrops of military band music, Indian flutes, quotations from Kipling poetry, and recordings of chai venders at Indian train stations. Sutaria contends that the arrangement of British and Indian voices addressing these issues as if they are in conversation with one another rather than with interviewer and program producer Charles Allen, simulates a reconciliation that has never actually taken place. Ironically, British listeners drawn into the immediacy of this constructed exchange conjured through montage are prompted into empathy with the plight of immigrants as they hear damning critiques of the wounds inflicted by Empire while simultaneously giving them the illusion that they, along with the program producers and Britain, have successfully engaged in a reconciliation that assuages imperial guilt.
Exploring such ambiguities across three continents, this panel aims to discover what diversity politics owes to the forms that represent it, to critique the montage dynamics so often deployed to imagine, to enable, and to delimit diversity at large.