CONCLUSION

This essay aimed at using montage theory as a device that could analyse objects of hyperreality. Kuleshov and Eisenstein provided the cut with a vocabulary, showing how the juxtaposition or collision of images is primarily the way in which meaning is created within cinema, whilst Murch demonstrated how in the everyday the individual’s mental narrative is edited through blinking as to render profound reality as discontinuous. This research demonstrated that neither time nor perception is longer continuous – but is instead governed by a system that reinforces the body and perception to be separated via notification cuts, turning the individual’s attention to the omnipresent algorithmic film. Along with this, the cut also engages us in the spatial reality, with Colomina realizing that modern architecture functions as media, where shopping centres act as metric montage and entrances as intellectual montage – modern architecture under system the cut describes is edited space, rather than functioning public space. Through compounding interactions with hyperreal objects, a system, in which Bernays laid the groundwork for, describes a simulated reality in which ‘the individual’ occupies where no experience is without nostalgia, with little engagement with the profound reality, and is allowed without mediation. This thesis demonstrated that ‘the individual’ no longer merely consumes the cut but lives inside it.

The methodology of this thesis raises several limitations, such as it is still largely metaphorical. While montage theory was effectively extended and used to describe non-filmic contexts, there remains the risk that the cut is creative analogy rather than analytical precision. Montage theory may provide vocabulary; it may extend film editing to spatial/temporal experience but could require interpretive leaps that some may find as imprecise. The methodology would benefit from the use of empirical data. As well as this, the essay’s scope is also limited. The second half section describes a highly idealised, Western and middle-class example which does not engage in generational differences. Can the cut helpfully explain how generation alpha engages in a hyperreal world? How do the elderly? There is also virtual reality, a model of simulation that genuinely produces seamless immersion without cuts. If virtual reality eliminates cuts through continuous immersion, does this invalidate the thesis or demonstrate that continuous experience now requires technological intervention? This research I suggest would benefit from more rigorous engagement with one author, perhaps Baudrillard, rather than a more surface level focus on many authors.

However, despite these limitations, the cut offers a framework that can diagnose how cinematic logic structures contemporary experience – a framework that future research might extend, refine, alter or challenge. Through empirical, multi-cultural analysis and more thorough engagement with emerging media forms, this thesis may become a fuller body of research. After conducting this investigation, the breadth and depth of this subject have become apparent. This essay has remained largely metaphorical since its subject is so total.

In more speculative terms, the cut may also predict an emerging trend of resistance against living inside of the cut. It is too easy to say that the individual lacks little human agency, and I think it is fair to say that generally the individual will become tired of a lack of choices, of not owning things, of constant mental cutting – a return to the profound reality in which the individual finds meaning. This essay is not intended to be read pessimistically.