"Paradigm Shift" Participants

ABSTRACT
This work is an attempt to retrieve the theoretical legacy of cinematic montage in order to accomplish its constructive role to the media iconic languages. Carried as a cognitive and aesthetic procedure in Russian cinema of the twenties, montage became the structural principle of art and instrument for cultural interaction. Nevertheless, unlike the current debate about the convergence of media and interactive networks, the cinematic montage theory recovers the critical inquiry of Sergei M. Eisenstein, namely the concept of montage as a field of confrontating ideas and assimetric relationship. It is not as convergency but as conflict that cinematic montage shapes the new media iconic languages. According with the structural law of montage the combination of the cinematic shots does not provide a balanced unity but an organic cell of contrasting processes. Furthermore, due to the confrontation the montage provides a leap in a new signifying ground and consequently a new quality of relationship. The confronting codes in transformation gives birth to new media iconic languages, as proposed by M. McLuhan. So, one of the objective of this work is to explore the concept of cinematic montage in the context of the new media semiotic space in which the montage of film shots, sounds, words, and movement produces new media iconic relations. Taken as the result of the electronic processing of cultural codes, the iconic languages represent not only the experience of the cinema but of the 20 century media history.