Trond Lundemo

Biography

B. 1963. Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. PhD in 1996, with dissertation Bildets oppløsning; Filmens bevegelse i historisk og teoretisk perspektiv. Member of the steering committee of the Research School for Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Individual research project 2005-2008: “Image Intersections”, funded by Swedish Research Council. Visiting professor and visiting scholar at the Seijo University of Tokyo for in all three semesters, in 2002, 2004 and 2007.

Ongoing research

Lundemo will contribute a study on the role of cinema and specifically the concept of montage for shaping historical consciousness. Commenting upon his eight-part video essay Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Jean-Luc Godard argues that cinema is technically predisposed for the construction of historical connections. This is because cinema’s main structural principle is montage, and the juxtaposition of images, sounds and texts is what constitutes history. This aligns Godard’s project in various ways with many other works deploying the historical aspects of montage in the 20th Century, as Sergei Eisenstein’s and Dziga Vertov’s in cinema, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in art history, as well as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project and numerous approaches to history in contemporary art. What are the historical-methodological implications of various concepts of montage, and which forms of historical consciousness and subjectivity do they convey? The project will study the classical, or ‘organic’, montage; the dialectic, or ‘intellectual’, montage devised in the Soviet montage school, and the database ‘montage’ in gallery multi-screen projections and in online archives (YouTube, Internet.archive, etc). Lundemo is currently in the process of concluding and compiling the findings of a three-year research project financed by VR on ‘image intersections’ in different ages of archival techniques, to be published as an English language monograph. The proposed project should be seen as a continuation and development of these findings towards a historical-theoretical discussion of montage.

Selected bibliography

“The Colour of Haptic Space; Black, Blue and White in Moving Images”, Color; a Reader, eds. Brian Price & Angela Delle Vacche) (London: Routledge 2006)

– ed. Film/Konst; Kairos 9:1 and Kairos 9:2 (Stockholm: Raster 2004), with ”Introduktion: Att tänka i de intelligenta maskinernas tidsålder”

– “The Index and Erasure; Godard’s Approach to Film History”, For Ever Godard (ed. Michael Temple, James Williams, Michael Witt) (London: Black Dog 2004)

– Jean Epstein – intelligensen hos en maskin/The Intelligence of a Machine, (Stockholm: Cinemateket 2001)

– Bildets oppløsning; Filmens bevegelse i historisk og teoretisk perspektiv, academic Ph.D. dissertation (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag 1996)