Animation and Montage: Or, Photographic Records of Documents

This chapter takes up the central methodological problem for the frame-by-frame method: how to account for and think about the thousands of frames in each cartoon. It argues for understanding the frame as a photographic document, one that records the process of its own production. This entails treating the image in the frame as distinct from the flow of the film, isolating it and looking for new connections with other images—whether from the same cartoon or not. To derive an adequate method, the chapter turns to models of montage from the American avant-garde and historiographic studies of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville by Jay Leyda. In all of these, a focus on the individual fragment—whether historical document or visual image—allows for new approaches to what the frame shows. This chapter thus offers a model for understanding the historical and theoretical significance of the part (or, in this case, the frame) in relationship to the work of art as a whole.