Montage

Abstract

“How can we see time?” This question is raised in the opening sentence of Didi-Huberman’s book-length study of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 photobook <i>Kriegsfibel</i> (<i>War Primer</i> in English translation (2017)), pieced together with scissors and glue from press clippings and self-penned epigrams. Three years later, in the concluding sentence of his second volume devoted to the unfinished <i>Mnemosyne Atlas</i>, created by the cultural historian Aby Warburg in the late 1920s, Didi-Huberman declares that the tenacious construction of montage constitutes “the difficult — and dialectical — work of anyone who attempts to see time”.