Assembly Lines

A bold new understanding of montage and French cinematic history

Amid the tumult of change that swept through French society in the wake of World War II, a trio of visionary filmmakers sought to make meaning of the chaos by revitalising a common method: montage. Revealing Nicole Vedres, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker as more than just groundbreaking auteurs, Ivan Cerecina shows how their collective infusion of montage with avant-garde aesthetics renewed the art of cinema while helping France reckon with its past and imagine its future.

Assembly Lines challenges a dominant story of postwar French film, championed by critics at important film journals like Cahiers du cinema, that has generally centred realist film aesthetics. Working against this tendency, Cerecina shows how Vedres, Resnais, and Marker revitalised montage as a technique in response to the crises of the times, using it to process the ravages of the recent past, expose hidden connections, and uncover signs of coming catastrophe. Wedding insightful analyses of films and French cultural history with writings from lesser-heard voices like Andre Malraux, Jacques Brunius, and Henri Langlois, Assembly Lines illuminates obscured networks of critics, filmmakers, and historians to reshape our conception of French film and documentary. Meanwhile, Cerecina's in-depth archival research unearths vital documents, including correspondence and production notes on Vedres's Paris 1900 and Resnais's Night and Fog.

More than a cinematic retrospective, Cerecina's investigation of montage is also a call to action today as contemporary crises prompt reevaluation of our cultural histories. Assembly Lines exemplifies a powerful, future-oriented practice of historical reflection with implications that go well beyond the study of film.

Assembly Lines provides a generative theorisation of montage in postwar France, exploring how the technique became a key method for reflecting on the past, agitating the present, and deciphering the future. Beautifully written and lucidly argued, this book is an absolute pleasure to think alongside and a valuable contribution to the field." James Leo Cahill, author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painleve

"Postwar French documentary has long been recognised as a high point in film history. Focusing on the work of Nicole Vedres, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, Ivan Cerecina draws fresh and compelling connections between documentary film, art, and politics. The compilation film, he reveals, constitutes a powerful historiography, one that shaped our thinking about the Cold War, colonialism, and World War II." Kelley Conway, University of Wisconsin-Madison