Ostranenie, “The Montage of Attractions” and Early Cinema’s “Properly Irreducible Alien Quality”

In this chapter, Annie van den Oever builds on previous research conducted with a team of early film scholars—Yuri Tsivian, Ian Christie, and Frank Kessler among them—for the edited volume on Ostrannenie, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2010. Van den Oever argues that Viktor Shklovsky’s key text “Art as Technique,” which revolves around the famous Russian neologism ostran(n)enie (“making strange”), draws from two historically related phenomena: (1) the early film shows which cleverly exploited the expressive potential of the Lumière’s 1895 “new cinema machine” to make humans and objects look “strange,” if not “grotesque” (as Maxim Gorky aptly argued in 1896 in his seminal essay, “Last Night I Was in the Kingdom of Shadows”); and (2) the 1910s avant-garde performances in which Shklovsky’s Futurist friends (the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky among them) mimicked and celebrated the “strangeness” of the film shows. These two phenomena form the context for the inception of “Art as Technique.” To make this point, Van den Oever rereads “Art as Technique” within the historical context of the early film shows and addresses the question of how the new cinema machine prompted Maxim Gorky to label it a “grotesque” creation. The aim of this chapter is to create a new understanding of the theory of ostran(n)enie and its relevance for twenty-first-century research on techniques and technologies. To this end, Van den Oever presents specific fragments of a cultural archeology of the then-new cinema machine and an excavation of its novelty and strange effects.