The concept of somatic montage extends this artistic evolution to the immersive moving image, taking the tesseract, the four-dimensional cube, as a model-metaphor for time-based forms of composition that derive from the deconstruction of linear sources, allowing for a multidimensional re-composition of the parts that actively engages the viewer in constructing associative flow structures.

on the profound role that concepts of n-dimensional geometry, hyperspace, non-Euclidean geometry, and the fourth dimension played in the development of the avant-garde at the turn of the last century these were all scientific discoveries that inspired new artistic approaches to space-time, motion, and the faceting of perspective. See The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Henderson, 1983). The projection architecture becomes an ordering element in the compositional flow of the film, an element of the cinematic grammar that allows the spectator to construct an interpreted field of associations and meaning in the creation of a poetic narrative.Īrt historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson has written a comprehensive treatise Immersive cinema forms a four-dimensional, navigable cinematic space in which the montage composition becomes an embodied, participatory experience. The expanded cinema mediums of fulldome cinema, immersive video and film installation, virtual reality, and extended reality, when approached as architectonic spaces occupied by the immersive motion picture, allow for a spatialized, non-linear juxtaposition of the cinematic elements or ‘cells’.

is a new approach to the established cinematic language of montage that marries chronological with spatial composition in the creation of narrative, presented here as an extended, supra-dimensional notion of what Eisenstein called the ‘disjunctive method of narration’. Portions of this paper are reproduced from the unpublished dissertation Somatic Montage: Supra-Dimensional Composition in Cinema and the Arts ( Chamier-Waite, 2019). The nomenclature ‘somatic montage’ was first introduced by this author in ‘The Cine-poetics of Fulldome Cinema’ ( Chamier-Waite, 2013). Immersive cinema affords a proprioceptive interaction of form and content, allowing the signification structure of a film to extend outwards from its internal narrative structure into the architectonic geometry of its projection space. The development of a formal, cinematic language for immersive motion pictures is currently in its early stage, a stage comparable to the invention of rhythmic montage pioneered by filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, by the early Soviet cinema movement, and by the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s.

Soviet montage film movement