Experimental Montage and the Making of Female Subjectivity

Montage, the splicing together of a series of separate moving images, manifests a power greater than the sum of its parts. Beyond the Frankenstein-like technical process of forging a continuous scene from disparate elements, montage can be employed as a psychologically expressive cinematic device that either gatekeeps or streamlines access to a character’s fragmented perception, emotional dissonance, or private consciousness. Both Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974) employ montage not merely as a stylistic choice but as a means of inhabiting fractured female experience. Each experiment with montage as a means of subverting the monolithic depiction of female protagonists in mainstream cinema by mirroring their complex interiority onscreen. Resnais artistically externalizes the dissonant experience of the protagonist’s personal and collective memory and trauma through elliptical, associative montage, whereas Cassavetes collapses montage into a scene’s temporal and emotional immediacy, prioritizing punishing long takes over fragmentation to render its protagonist's volatile domestic life and confused selfhood bare for his audience. Together, their divergent approaches illuminate how montage, whether through poetic fragmentation or unyielding denial of release, becomes a site for expressing social constraint and the interior complexity of female subjectivity. 

Hiroshima mon amour’s poetic montage translates the fluidity of recollection into filmic form, using fragmentation, association, and repetition to externalize the female protagonist’s intimate experience of trauma and cyclical memory. The film’s opening sequence establishes poetic montage as a means of externalizing subjective consciousness. It opens on close-ups of lovers’ limbs glistening in sweat, dusted in ash, then gleaming in glitter, intercut with documentary-style images of Hiroshima’s grotesque ruins and wounds such as burned scalps, melted metal, and deteriorating buildings. Resnais’ unconventional montage combines these visually disparate elements to elicit a discomforting reaction by collapsing the distinction between romantic intimacy and historical horror.

Through this juxtaposition of both staged and pre-existing material, along with the infusion of historical horror into an intimate setting through the ash covering the lovers’ limbs, Resnais suggests that the boundaries between personal and collective trauma are porous and malleable. His camera movement reinforces this dreamlike malleability through smooth, gliding tracking shots that drift across the lovers’ bodies and the devastated city ruins, as if suturing their difference into one continuous visual space. The mechanical precision of this motion, contrasted with the fragmentary textures of the images themselves, mirrors the protagonist’s attempts to impose order on her incoherent, irreconcilable mental landscape. Resnais’ montage thus functions through association rather than chronological sequence, implying that desire and devastation exist not as separate temporal events or emotional states, but as overlapping experiences within the unnamed female protagonist’s mind. 

Translating the fragmentation of memory through abrupt cuts between disparate visual elements, Hiroshima mon amour builds a visual rhythm that holds a mirror up to the nature of thought itself which is often contradictory and cyclical. The very first image of the opening montage, intertwined skin and ash, sets a precedent that grounds the female protagonist’s perspective to her body. In doing so, it renders her body itself inseparable from the ashen contamination of outside forces, or her remembrance of past romantic and social traumas; namely, her grief and exile after her forbidden relationship with a German soldier. Through a poetic montage of both body and ruin, the film expresses female subjectivity within dual truths, where love and horror are experienced by the protagonist as simultaneous realities. 

Resnais furthers his exploration of interiority by emphasizing montage’s capacity for subjective, temporal fragmentation through the protagonist’s recurring flashbacks to Nevers, her French hometown. Her memory of her affair with the German soldier appears not in chronological order, but through immersive fragments that withhold divulging a complete narrative. For instance, Resnais cuts abruptly from the male protagonist’s twitching hand as he sleeps after their one-night stand to the woman’s face and then to a 4-second flash of her dead lover’s hand and bloodied face as he lies shot in the street. Through such fleeting images of painful backstory, Hiroshima mon amour blurs the traumatic geography of Nevers, Hiroshima, and even the woman’s mental landscape itself. In doing so, it resists temporal or spatial continuity in favor of building a sense of disorientation that externalizes the woman’s interior attempts to reconcile discordant memories of collective loss, personal grief, and displacement. Montage is what attempts to give structure, or visual logic, to the woman’s emotional process and subjective experience of recollection. By moving fluidly through present subjectivity and past memory, Resnais reveals how the woman wrestles with her memory through comparison rather than linear continuity. Moreover, Resnais' non-linear montage reflects the unmoored temporality of the woman’s mind rather than the chronology of the body, such as when he abruptly cuts from the woman’s present-day recollection of her prison cell to a flash of the reality of the cell itself from her perspective. The audience themselves is forced to first listen to her testimony of trauma, then subsequently inhabit her very sight; a subjective, visceral experience. With her memories dictating the film’s non-linear montage, Resnais imbues the female protagonist with autonomy over the narrative that allows her interior consciousness, rather than external reality, to govern Hiroshima mon amour’s sense of cinematic time and place. 

Where Resnais externalizes the psyche through abstract fragmentation and juxtaposition, Cassavetes drives his representation of female subjectivity in the discomforting awkwardness and immediacy of prolonged time, using montage to convey the female protagonist’s mental and physical entrapment. A Woman Under the Influence appears seemingly anti-montage in its more organic approach to conveying time and space, as its naturalistic long takes and handheld camera work suggest a rejection of Resnais’ structured editing and stylized fragmentation of experience. However, Cassavetes’ approach reflects less of a refusal to create montage than a redefinition of montage that finds greater meaning and intention through a scene’s uninterrupted duration. For Cassavetes, meaning is generated through temporal rhythm that swings between suffocating stillness, scenes that stretch into discomforting quiet, and abrupt ruptures of stillness driven by the female protagonist, Mabel’s, volatile interiority. 

For instance, the dinner party scene unfolds with agonizing slowness as Cassavetes lingers on Mabel’s erratic behavior before her husband’s scrutinizing colleagues, then gradually pans down to the men’s uneasy expressions after Nick commands her to sit down. In a subsequent close-up, one man’s eyes drop in discomfort while Mabel, blurred in the background, scurries to obey before the camera abruptly pans to her discouraged expression. Cassavetes’s elongated montage traps the viewer within the claustrophobia of domestic tension. Through the restless swaying of his handheld camerawork, Cassavetes collapses the distance between Mabel’s interior instability and the viewer’s own, indicating that the camera itself is struggling to contain her volatility. Similarly, Cassavetes’ focus on simultaneous behavior, for instance the man’s close-up of discomfort and Mabel’s out-of-focus obedience, disorient the authority of Mabel’s presence onscreen. Through this rhythm of sustained action and sudden rupture, Cassavetes transforms the continuity of time itself into a site of psychological expression, depicting Mabel’s interior instability not through disjointed cuts but through the unbearable persistence of what unfolds within the frame. 

When Mabel returns home from being institutionalized, Cassavetes again uses elongated montage and rhythmic rupture to mirror her disorienting perception. Before Mabel even steps out of the car, the camera adopts her perspective as friends and strangers crowd around the car window in a frenzy, offering platitudes and trite words of encouragement. Cassavetes subsequently lingers on an unyielding 18-second long take of Nick, standing alone, straining to see her through the crowd. Nearly four times longer than the average 3-second film shot, this moment emphasizes the weight of his isolation and the tension of his expectancy. As a key example of Cassavetes’ montage style, the scene oscillates between the frenzy of overeager guests and the stillness of Nick’s anticipation with a minimalistic approach to cutting that creates a sense of temporal and spatial unevenness. Through this disjointed approach, or its rhythm of sustained action and rupture, A Woman Under the Influence mirrors Mabel’s sense of suffocation and confinement. Even returning home, Mabel finds no solace in the barrage of frenzied activity approaching her, nor the anticipation of her husband’s hopeful yet scrutinizing expression, and the viewer is bound to simply sit, watch, and endure Mabel’s experience of a home she cannot fully reenter and share in her unstable experience of time. Through elongated montage, Cassavetes prolongs Mabel’s visceral and unbearable social performance and builds suspense for her impending, perhaps inevitable breakdown in private. Rejecting abstraction or flashback, Cassavetes’ montage emphasizes her lived temporality and collapses the line between filmic realism and psychological instability, wielding shot duration and pacing to invite viewers to not only witness Mabel’s psyche, but engage in its rhythm of tumultuous constraint. 

Taken together, the approaches of Resnais and Cassavetes reflect broader post-WWII cinematic trends in conveying subjectivity. By the late 1950s, classical continuity editing took a backseat to filmmakers’ emerging interest in the fragmented and associative nature of human consciousness. Fusing political reflection with psychological exploration, French New Wave filmmakers like Resnais increasingly turned to aesthetic innovations that disrupted the continuity rules of mainstream cinema and incorporated documentary realism with poetic abstraction. Hiroshima mon amour emerged within this context as a radical meditation on postwar memory and trauma. Its elliptical editing structure mirrors the non-linear temporality of human thought and recollection, dissolving binaries between past and present or personal and collective experience. Conversely, A Woman Under the Influence belongs to a movement of 1970s American independent cinema challenging the predictable boundaries of Hollywood narrative structure and standard form. Cassavetes, infamously known as the nagging thorn in Hollywood’s side, rejected the polished montage of big-studio filmmaking in favor of uninterrupted long takes that capture the raw emotional immediacy of a scene. Through a seemingly anti-montage, actor-focused editing style, Cassavetes exposed the intangible instability of his female protagonist’s consciousness, fifteen years after Resnais’ use of montage to define his female protagonist’s consciousness through poetic structure. Even at the level of camerawork, Resnais’ smooth and surgical tracking expresses interiority through formal fluidity while Cassavetes’ handheld intimacy allows the viewer a more immersive experience into Mabel’s consciousness. 

Both films are also situated within the development of a feminist cinema that turned greater attention to exploring the inner world of complex female characters independent of their relation to men, although largely centered on a white, middle-class experience. The portrayal of this female perspective in both films is not simply psychological but also social, shaped by repression, desire, and the physical constraints imposed by gendered norms. In each, montage becomes an act of defiance against mainstream filmmaking’s tendency to obscure female psychology and interiority within coherent narratives. Instead, Resnais and Cassavetes deploy montage as a language of fragmentation and uninterrupted emotion, respectively, crafting forms through which women’s interior lives are made accessible, unavoidable, and radically human. 

By rendering their female protagonists’ interior worlds intelligible and visible, Hiroshima mon amour and A Woman Under the Influence unearth them from the social expectations and systems that repress them in reality. While Resnais externalizes his protagonist’s memory and consciousness through associative montage and temporal disjunction, Cassavetes stretches time itself to imbue Mabel’s feelings and perception with a visceral, palpable quality. Through distinct approaches, both dismantle the mainstream mode of linear or seamless montage that prizes audience expectation and narrative coherence over exploring the depth of female subjectivity. Montage, whether poetic or elongated, functions in both films as a feminist mode of expression, making mental landscapes legible onscreen and challenging an editing tradition that has historically erased women’s complexity.

Works Cited 

Cassavetes, John, director. A Woman Under the Influence. Faces, 1974. Accessed 9 October 2025. Resnais, Alain, director. Hiroshima mon amour. Argos Films, 1959. Accessed 9 October 2025.

Natasha Last-Bernal is a junior at Barnard College studying Film and Human Rights. She is passionate about collectivizing cinema and leads collaborative film projects at CU Girls Who Film. She loves experimental art, botanical gardens, and traveling to unfamiliar places. 

@natashalbernal