Beyond Spatial Montage

5  Conclusions

The potential of on-screen structures that appear as displacement is at once deeply under-theorized, but at the same time overdetermined. The same series of structures are shared by both avant-garde and commercial media. The failure of existing theorizations originates with those theories’ demand that the displaced structures of windowing be essentially critical, ignoring the alternative uses that are apparent within commercial media production. The uniformity of this morphology, which allows both collage/montage-like juxtapositions and seamless constructions of realist continuity, demonstrates the independence of these structure’s meaning from their formal organization. These on-screen structures function at a more basic ...