The Aesthetics of Digital Montage: Film Editing and Technological Change

by Marc Furstenau

Overview

Tracing the recent changes to the technology of film editing, this book offers an account of the aesthetics of digital montage. It is commonly argued that the changes to the technical apparatus of editing, the emergence of new systems for digital editing, have altered the basic identity or ontology of the cinema as an art. Such claims, it is argued in this book, are based on a misunderstanding of the relation between technology and technique, and more generally between the technical and the aesthetic. Applying recent theories of art, and employing specific concepts from philosophical aesthetics, an account of cinematic art is offered that can better accommodate the kinds of technical changes that have occurred in recent decades, with the advent of computer technology in the cinema. An aesthetics of digital montage is presented as part of a more general proposal for a theory of technical change in the cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040784471
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/01/2025
Series:	Cinema and Technology
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	294
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Marc Furstenau is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. He published articles on a range of topics and is the editor of The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments (Routledge, 2010), co-editor of Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices (Palgrave, 2008), and co-editor of Special Effects on the Screen: Faking the View from Méliès to Motion Capture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He is past editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations, Introduction, 1: The Fate of Film Editing, 2: Editing, Intention, and the Work of Film Art, 3: The Technology and Technique of Film Editing, 4: Digital Montage and the Ontology of the Cinema, 5: The Art of Editing in the Digital Era, Conclusion, Acknowledgements, Bibliography, Index.