Research Statement

Research Questions

Oops! is a video installation and single-screen work that investigates the political potential of interruption as montage in audio-visual art. This project draws on Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of epic theatre, where interruption disrupts narrative continuity to expose ideological structures. It extends this through Judith Butler’s feminist and queer response to his text, translating these ideas within contemporary video practice. The work examines how montage functions as a political gesture, unsettling fixed narratives and prompting critical engagement with power relations in contemporary Australian domestic and social contexts.

The research questions guiding Oops! are:

• How can Walter Benjamin’s concept of interruption be literalised in single-screen video art practice?

• How can the video artist enact feminist and queer gestus (Mumford, 2008; Diamond, 1997), through the tactics of montage?

By addressing these questions, Oops! explores how video art can trouble ideological structures and shape spectatorship through audiovisual strategies.  

Context / Significance

Oops! exists in a theoretical space that traverses screen, performance, theatre and visual art, with its understanding of montage extending across these forms. The project engages with key theoretical frameworks from Brechtian epic theatre, Soviet montage theory, and Butler’s performativity lens.

Benjamin’s (1998) theory on epic theatre’s use of interruption as a form of montage is central to Oops! as practice-led research. To illustrate how epic theatre functions, he describes a violent domestic scene abruptly interrupted by a stranger, halting the narrative’s forward motion and exposing its ideological underpinnings through the interloper’s gaze. He writes, ‘the stranger is confronted with a certain set of conditions: troubled faces, open window, a devastated interior’ (p. 19). The interruption fractures theatrical illusion, distancing the viewer and revealing the social conditions embedded in the scene. Through this rupture, the familiar becomes strange, exposing hidden structural dynamics alongside the cultural logics that sustain them.

The Brechtian interruption, as theorised in film studies, aligns with Sergei Eisenstein’s (1949) concept of montage as a collision of elements that generates new meaning, activating intellectual and ideological responses. Following Benjamin’s claim that ‘montage interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ (p. 99), Oops! employs this technique to break spatial, temporal, and ideological continuity in both its single-screen format and three-screen installation.

A central theoretical foundation is Brecht’s concept of gestus, which demonstrates through performance that gestures and attitudes are not natural or innate, but socially and historically produced. The gestus created in performance reveals to the audience the power relations that construct the social subject within a particular place and time (Mumford, 2008). In Oops!, this manifests through performative interruptions, employing Brechtian techniques such as the Verfremdungseffekt (distancing), historicisation, and the ‘not … but’ device. Diamond’s (1997) feminist reading of Brecht expands this idea, arguing that gestic actions can destabilise gender norms.

Extending this further, Butler’s (2017) reading of Benjamin positions interruption itself as a gesture that is at once citation – it draws on familiar forms/scenes – and event – it occurs in the moment, breaking the flow. She argues that interruption functions like a citation: recognisable within a chain of meanings yet displaced from its original temporal and spatial context. For Butler, the gesture of interruption differs from the performative speech act or gender performativity in that it halts rather than produces action. It becomes a still or pause that stalls violence before it materialises, exposing what is latent yet suspended. This temporal break unsettles linearity, making what once seemed familiar or natural appear strange and astonishing. Butler describes this effect as a gesture that ‘might also be understood as a critical practice that seeks to bring to a halt forms of violence accepted as quotidian’ (p. 178).

This account of interruption resonates with recent feminist reconsiderations of montage and editing practices. Numerous feminist practitioners and scholars have pointed to the invisibility, indeed the erasure, of female editors in the filmic canon (see Gadassik, 2021; Heftberger and Pearlman, 2018; Reese, 2024). Within this forgotten history, Carrie Reese (2024) argues for ‘a feminist montage that is born from the cut yet exceeds the image’ (p. 61). She theorises the cut as an in-between or liminal space that ‘holds open’ rather than sutures (p. 74 emphasis in original). This resonates with Butler’s account of interruption as a decomposed performative. Both insist that meaning is generated not through resolution but through suspension: a pause that estranges continuity and compels thought.

There is not enough scope here to analyse further examples in depth, but I want to gesture toward the potential of a feminist montage in this analysis — one that both sustains critique and opens to something different. This disruption also unsettles the identificatory positions long critiqued by feminist film theory: those of the camera, the male protagonist, and the audience (Mulvey, 1975). In Oops! montage displaces rather than secures these alignments, reframing spectatorship as collective critique.

Another contemporary Australian example might be Zanny Begg’s The Beehive (2018). Shown in a gallery space, the work generated 1,344 possible editing combinations, with a different sequence shown each day. No single narrative or identification could settle, thereby interrupting identificatory positions, continuity, and narrative stability. Taken together, these perspectives situate Oops! within a broader set of feminist and queer strategies that use and recognise montage as a tool that unsettles identification, continuity, and narrative security. This is the ground from which I now turn to analyse the specific tactics mobilised in my own work. 

Methods 

Oops! literalises these theoretical concepts by presenting three narratives of domestic conflict in contemporary Australian households, exploring intersections of class, race, and gender. The aim with Oops! was to disrupt the rhetorical moment: that point when a person with privilege leans in to their taken-for-granted assumptions, believing that those assumptions are widely shared, unquestionable, will remain unchallenged, and therefore will have no reply. The work was made from a feminist and queer position, understanding subjectivity as fluid rather than bound by essentialised identity categories.

While audiences may be familiar with disjointed montage in contexts ranging from advertising to action cinema to avant-garde abstraction, these forms typically pursue different aims. Often designed for aesthetic intensity or affective momentum, they contrast with the approach taken in Oops!. Unlike the rapid cutting of advertising or action cinema, which typically amplifies affect or spectacle, the cuts in Oops! are deliberately framed as interruptions that estrange rather than intensify. At the same time, drawing on Eisenstein’s notion of intellectual montage, these collisions of images are politically charged and carefully positioned to generate concepts through juxtaposition, making visible the ideological weight carried in everyday domestic gestures.

Within the video, montage disrupts each scene through abrupt cuts, unexpected close-ups, and juxtapositions of incongruous imagery. Objects such as lamingtons, kebabs, red wine, board games, and food preparation, which are symbols embedded in the Australian advertising psyche as markers of family and leisure, are presented in extreme close-up. Following Eisenstein (1949), these objects function as ideological signifiers rather than mere representations. Seeing them magnified beyond their usual scale transforms them into sites of analysis: ‘The principal function of the close-up … is not only and not so much to show or to present, as to signify, to give meaning, to designate’ (p. 238).

In making these familiar domestic rituals strange, the work exposes how white patriarchal norms are embedded in everyday practices of food, leisure, socialisation and family life. These ordinary gestures are shown to be saturated with classed, racialised, and gendered assumptions that sustain the social order under the guise of domestic harmony.

In addition to exposing ideological weight, close-ups reconfigure temporality and spatial continuity. Doane (2003) argues that the close-up halts narrative temporality, presenting the image as an isolated surface or object (p. 91). In Oops!, repeated intrusive close-ups fracture scene continuity. This pause, created by the close-up, is itself a form of interruption; one that both forces re-evaluation of the scene and disrupts linear time. By fragmenting bodies and gestures, close-ups dislocate characters from their spatial surroundings, creating a sense of spatial discontinuity. The abrupt shifts in scale and framing destabilise the viewer’s perception of a continuous space, making it difficult to situate subjects in a coherent spatial relationship. Simultaneously, the interruption of temporal flow through these close-ups suspends action. This disjunction between space and time unsettles narrative coherence, reinforcing the film’s interrogation of power structures and the affective weight of interruption.

These close-ups exemplify Butler’s conception of interruption as a decomposed performative: moments of suspension where the expected flow of domestic conflict is held in abeyance. They expose the latent violence of patriarchal and racialised dynamics in the Australian household, yet refuse to let it fully play out. Instead, the viewer encounters scenes as citations, recognisable within the cultural imaginary of the family unit, but rendered strange through their extraction and recontextualisation.

Butler describes this effect as the specific ‘performance’ of epic theater, what distinguishes it from Aristotelian “action”’ (p. 185). To be astonished within the conditions in which one exists becomes a form of alienation from them: ‘They break out of the continuity of history, we might say, and the naturalised understanding of social relations’ (ibid). In this way, Oops! mobilises montage not simply to fracture continuity, but to perform what Butler calls an astonishment: a break in history’s flow that estranges the social conditions in which the viewer is implicated.

In Oops!, the interruptions do not belong to any single character but act apart from them, reframing the scenes so that their significance is directed outward to the audience. In Butler’s terms, ‘[w]hen an action is incomplete, or treated separately from any consequence, it becomes for Brecht an occasion for the audience to recognize itself as a collective’ (ibid); the true ‘hero’ of the drama. This resonates with Benjamin’s account of epic theatre, where performance positions the audience as a collective thinker, refracting action through another’s vision rather than through identification with individual characters. This foregrounds Butler’s central claim that interruption, as gesture, is not only a matter of form but a critical practice of halting, or what she calls a ‘deliberate orchestration’ (p. 185) through which spectators are repositioned as collective thinkers.

Following Benjamin through Butler, ‘the gesture has become the event’ (p. 185 emphasis in the original). In other words, the incomplete, decontextualised action is the performance because it interrupts, displays, and reframes action, making visible the conditions of life (labour, violence, family, law) that usually pass unnoticed. As argued above, montage is interruption in various forms, so therefore, this kind of video artwork becomes performance through the edited events it creates. Using these tools as a performer employing gestic actions such as disidentifying, interrupting, de-historicising, and alienating becomes the performance of video art. In performing as editor, my gestic actions are shaped by a deliberate political intent, one that is feminist and queer.  

While this paper focuses on the single-screen version, the work also exists as a multi-screen installation, opening further possibilities for thinking about its performative and spatial dimensions.

Outcomes

Through its use of interruption, Oops! offers several key insights:

·   Interruption as performance: The use of montage and spatial disjunction that uses citation as method, destabilises the conventional expectations of the spectator. This disruption of familiar contexts, making the familiar strange, is an interruption that is a gestic action performed by the video artist. Through abrupt edits, shifts in framing, and disruption of narrative flow, Oops! situates video art as a site of critical engagement.

·   Perceptual disorientation as political critique: Abrupt cuts, close-ups, and spatial discontinuities unsettle the viewer’s sense of continuity, implicating them not only individually but as part of a collective audience drawn into the social conditions the work interrupts and exposes.

·   Queer and feminist gestic action: Interruption, whether through editing, can function as a feminist and queer gestic action. By fragmenting continuity Oops! enacts a form of gestus that resists fixed identification and exposes ideological structures. The work’s interruptions disrupt narrative coherence, foregrounding power relations through gestic actions that critically challenge normative narratives of exclusion.

·  Collective spectatorship: The interruptions do not belong to individual characters but act outwardly, positioning the audience as a collective thinker. In this way, Oops! refigures spectatorship as a shared critical practice rather than individual identification.

Impact

Oops! has been exhibited and recognised for its conceptual and aesthetic contributions to contemporary video art. In 2020, it was exhibited as a three-screen installation at Trocadero Art Space, Melbourne, Australia, and later adapted into a two-screen format at MARS Gallery, Melbourne, Australia. It was also shown as a single-screen work at Footscray Community Arts Centre (impact reach: 3,940 visitors) and included in #FEAS Unfinished Business at Spectrum Project Space, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia. The work received an Honourable Mention at the Mexico Independent Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Footscray Art Prize, selected among 37 works from over 700 submissions. Oops! has been critically engaged with in catalogue essays by Adrian Martin (2020) and Ashley Crawford (2021).

These exhibitions and recognitions underscore Oops! as a significant contribution to contemporary video art, affirming its impact within both academic and artistic communities.

References

Benjamin, W. (1998). Understanding Brecht. Translated by A. Bostock. London/New York: Verso. 

Butler, J. (2017). ‘When gesture becomes event’. In A. Street, J. Montgomery & B. Watt eds, Inter Views in Performance Philosophy. Performance Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 171-191.

Crawford, A. (2021). The Horror of the Banal. cassandratytler.com [online]. Available from: https://www.cassandratytler.com/work#/oops/

Diamond, E. (1997) Unmaking mimesis: essays on feminism and theater. London: Routledge. 

Doane, M.A. (2003). The close-up: scale and detail in the cinema. Differences, 14(3), pp. 89–111. E-Duke.

Eisenstein, S. (1949) Film form: essays in film theory. [1st ed.]. Edited by J. Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Gadassik, A. (2021) ‘A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker’, in Malitsky, J. (ed.) A Companion to Documentary Film History. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 165–167

Heftberger, A. and Pearlman, K. (eds) (2018) ‘Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s’, Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, 6.

Martin, A. (2020). Agitated Faces, Open Window, Disordered Furniture. cassandratytler.com [online]. Available from: https://www.cassandratytler.com/work#/oops/

Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18.

Mumford, M. (2008) Bertolt Brecht. 1st ed. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Reese, C. (2024) “Toward a Feminist Montage: Reading for the Cut in Ana Mendieta’s Sweating Blood,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 63(2), pp. 58–75. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2024.a919191.

The Beehive (Zanny Begg, 2018, Australia)

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response to what follows

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

Oops! Is a highly engaging, emotionally powerful short film and installation. The emotional tensions of systemic violence experienced by characters who resist or do not conform to social norms is heightened through the interruption and interconnection of several overlapping scenes and the material and physical dynamics within them. We are pulled away from one scene to point our attention to sizzling meat, physical grappling, or a broken wine glass as the scenes intertwine. The separate scenes establish common themes and emotional timbres through this steady interruptions, the violence palpable throughout.

The artist, Cassandra Tytler, proposes to interweave Walter Benjamin’s concept of interruption with Brechtian and feminist approaches to media and performance. The form of the work, in and of itself, does not present a wholly new method in experimental media or film, but remains a powerful emotional approach to a particular feminist vision. 

The articulation in the research statement  of a material cut as a form of Brechtian interruption is interesting, but it fails to consider the current normative media context: our current understanding of “interruption.” Many audience members are highly accustomed to wild, incongruous, nonsequential cuts in the modern media landscape. The artist articulates their lens on Brecht through the work of Mumford and Diamond, but these two thinkers also predate the current rhythms of media. It can be argued that the drastic nature of the cuts is still rare in narrative cinema, but the presumed norm this theoretical approach is built on is still questionable: what counts as an interruption when the average viewer is bombarded with constant, drastic cuts? 

The reference to Ahmed in terms of spatial disorientation is well-considered, but this reviewer was only given a single-channel video to review, so it’s not possible to determine how this principle is embodied in a multimedia installation, and how the artist’s approach might differ from a broad contemporary context of installation in its feminist regard. Again, watching a work on multiple screens non-sequentially is a common experience in the contemporary context. I’d encourage the artist to explore their own feminist innovations in the craft of space and time—what unique approaches they might create.

I say this because the capacity is clearly there: it’s a great film. It is uncommon to use practice research as a means of articulating the violence and oppression of white, patriarchal society so thoroughly and effectively. The points of friction include: interior design and its association with “nice” domestic lives, veganism as an “insult” to meat-eating cultures, and game night as a test, not of real knowledge, but of familiarity with normative sports and culture. All the altercations are emotionally violent before becoming physically violent, articulated in the material interruptions throughout, before each scene is then itself interrupted by the entrance of another elder or community member. 

It serves as a powerful articulation of the experience of marginalization, exclusion, and the violence of white supremacist cultures: it will be exciting to see how this kind of work evolves in the future. 

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement (these should be outlined in detail in the review).

What are the main claims and purposes of the work?

The work Oops! takes both a single-screen linear and a multi-screen installed form and investigates the formal tool of interruption, as alienation from Bertolt Brecht and montage from Sergei Eisenstein. The author hones in on the notion of the ‘gestic’ as elaborated in Elin Diamond’s book ‘Unmaking Mimesis’ (1997), but also as attached to the thinking of Judith Butler. Political resistance and critical engagement are the ends that the author seeks through the strategy of interruption. 

Does it seem to make a genuine new contribution to knowledge or understanding of practice-research?

The trying out of Walter Benjamin’s example of the stranger who interrupts a private, domestic scene is impressively illustrated in the three different scenarios. However, what we learn from this interruption is less clear.

With its carefully layered disruptive sound effects, skilled naturalistic performances, and abrupt editing the single-screen linear version of Oops! offers a highly disconcerting experience that is compelling and that successfully calls upon the spectator to stop and think about what the film reveals. The interruptive editing of close-ups of objects, facial expressions and physical movements break the surface of the otherwise ‘natural’ gatherings: a family dinner, a BBQ with friends and a games night. 

The professional, scripted nature of the production sets up ways of relating to the dramatic content: dialogue, acting, characterisation, mood, settings, that differentiates the film from experimental cinema and the installation from other video art. This professional quality has the effect of drawing us into the three different scenarios, making the strategy of interruption even more disruptive. It also means, though, that the kind of revelation of the workings of a performance that was part of Brecht’s epic theatre or, as Judith Butler puts it, the ‘deliberate orchestration’ (185) of the maker, through which we become capable of critical thinking, is less assured.

Quite what is revealed beneath the highly conventional social situations is not as easy to uncover in the author’s accompanying text. A slippage occurs from the start to the end. At first interruption, in the form of the abrupt editing, is aligned with Brecht’s techniques, including ‘gestus’ expanded into ‘gestic actions’ from Diamond, to import a gendered dimension. But as we move into ‘methods and process’ and ‘outcomes’, so the gestic is split off from the techniques and effects, to be associated with the video artist: video work that employs gestic actions … becomes the performance of video art. The author needs to include a discussion of what they were trying to reveal. What precisely do they mean in the following instances: ‘to expose ideological structures’; ‘unsettling fixed narratives and prompting critical engagement with power relations’; ‘positioning subjectivity as fluid rather than bound by essentialised identity categories’; ‘experiencing a politics of disorientation’.

Is there any important relevant work that the submission does not acknowledge?

How strong is the research and theoretical context of the accompanying written statement? 

The execution is strong: the use of Walter Benjamin’s interruptive stranger as the starting point for this creative practice research leads the author to focus upon the potential of ‘disruption’ for creating an active critical spectator. The execution of this premise takes a sophisticated form, that impressively draws is in to the worlds that have been created, so that the disruptions are impactful and, as Benjamin puts it, cited by the author ‘astonishing’. 

However, the theoretical context has weaknesses (and see also below comments on the contextualisation of such research):  too many theorists are quoted without being explored in relation to each other. For example, the assertion that the film offers a ‘Queer and feminist gestic action’ seems to rely upon a short reference to Sara Ahmed’s book ‘Queer phenomenology’ and an equivalence between spatial re-orientation and interruption. I’m not convinced that Ahmed would approve of such an equivalence. Equally, since so many ideas derive from it, I’d suggest that Judith Butler’s essay ‘When gesture becomes event’ could be used as the main text leading the author through their ideas. Focusing on this essay would also allow the author to write in more depth about the communal aspect of the effect of disruption, as Butler puts it: When an action is incomplete, or treated separately from any consequence, it becomes for Brecht an occasion for the audience to recognize itself as a collective’. (185) Butler’s idea needs to be thought about given the use of the installation context.

Are there particular changes that you would deem either necessary or helpful for the work to be published?

I’d suggest that the work would be more powerful if the submission focused upon the single-screen film alone. This is because the written component offers no insight into how the installation fits into the last thirty years of moving images in galleries. The examples of artists who are looking to move their viewers to action and who use formal means, such as montage, to do so are many: from Hito Steyerl, Pierre Huyghe, or Runa Islam, to Australian/New Zealanders Angelica Mesiti, Daniel Crooks, Lisa Reihana. Rather than suggest that the author incorporate such a context, I believe that more time should be spent upon deepening the discussion of research and theory, as above.

How well organised and written is the accompanying statement?

I have no comments to make.

Are there particular changes that you would recommend to its presentation?

Only the expansion of particular sections as outlined above.

All reviews refer to the original research statement which has been edited in response