Montage and Solidarity. From the Third International to Third World Revolution
The research project explores transnational documentary film practices in what has been termed the »long« or »global sixties«. It follows militant filmmakers in their travels across different countries and analyzes their work in solidarity with liberation struggles, discussing the position of the spectator, the use of formal and narrative devices, and the affective configurations of what strove to be an anticolonial and anti-imperialist practice of image-making. At the same time, the project is interested in militant filmmaking as a mode of traveling and hence highlights processes of movement, exchange, and communication at and between sites of political struggle. In doing so, it seeks to move beyond a study of either national film cultures or the filmography of individual filmmakers. It unfolds a ciné-geography along a North-South and South-South axis to map out networks of solidarity connecting artists and militants in places like Algeria, Cuba, East and West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Vietnam.
Lorenz Hegel is a lecturer in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences cluster at Singapore University of Technology and Design. Before moving to Singapore, he taught at Yale University and the Berlin University of the Arts. Lorenz works at the intersection of critical theory, aesthetics, and film and media studies, with a particular focus on the form and history of political documentary cinema. His research explores the aesthetics and politics of anticolonial and transnational solidarity movements during the »long« sixties and seventies, postrevolutionary cinema in the early Soviet Union and Cuba, and representations of ecological and industrial transformation. Lorenz studied philosophy and literature in Hildesheim, Berlin, and Paris, and received his PhD in Film and Media Studies from Yale.
»Students, Party, and International Class Struggle: Revisiting Althusser’s 1968«, in: Historical Materialism (forthcoming)
Review of Mauro Resmini, Italian Political Cinema: Figures of the Long ’68 (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), in: Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, January 2025.
Review of Hanno Berger, Thinking Revolution Through Film: On Audiovisual Staging of Political Change (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2022), in: Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, May 2023.
As a cinematic technique, montage produces meaning by linking discrete images and sounds into signifying and affective sequences. Solidarity, as a political imperative, seeks to unite distinct social actors—classes, movements, and peoples—in shared struggle.