Annie Van den Oever, Ostrannenie, Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2010, pp. 278. ISBN 978 90 8964 079 6

The concept of ostranenie, as is well known, emerges out of Victor Shklovsky’s seminal essay on the nature and purpose of art, “Art as Technique” (sometimes alternatively translated as “Art as Device”). In his formulation, ostranenie is the aim of all artistic endeavour : to make strange the object being depicted, using the tropes offered up by a given medium, in order to extend and complicate the experience of perception. Navigating the world has so numbed our perceptual apparatus, Shklovsky writes, that Not only is the artifact itself unimportant, but the medium itself is somewhat irrelevant to Shklovsky’s commentary, which applies to art in toto, regardless of medium. Though the texts discussed in “Art as Technique” are predominantly prose-based, there is nothing in the essay that precludes applying its precepts to film. Annie van den Oever's recent collection of essays, Ostrannenie, is addressed primarily to film scholars for whom the Formalist concept of ostranenie has had only mitigated success. Indeed, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that what van den Oever calls the “key concept” (9) of Russian Formalism, one whose meaning is “making strange,” has itself become estranged from much film studies today. There is little doubt that similar and related concepts — Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, Freud’s unheimlich, and Eisenstein’s dialectical montage, to name only three — have overshadowed ostranenie, at least within film studies. So if nothing else, van den Oever’s timely collection at least increases the term’s visibility, rendering its (relative) exclusion in film scholarship conspicuous. The anthology, moreover, also functions as a coherent and cogent survey of the concept’s historical trajectory and its variegated role in film theory, arguing as a whole for the concept’s value in film studies at this particular moment of medium specificity and technological upheaval. One of the key elements of ostranenie is that it is historically situated; “the device of art” has to vary in order to remain effective because, over time, we will become accustomed to the tropes that are intended to produce the defamilarizing effect. Ostranenie mandates, then, that art constantly reinvent itself, that it never rest on its laurels. When one way of making the stone feel stony becomes ingrained and entrenched, it ceases to perform as intended; another must take its place, defamiliarizing us anew and thereby making the stone stony to our perception once more. Ostranenie, thus, suggests that we not only engage art historically — in its original context, to see how it was experienced at the time — but also transhistorically. For instance, the stylistic flourishes of a contemporary film like Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011) are estranging to contemporary audiences, but they would have been de rigueur in the era that the film evokes (the transition from silent-to-sound film production in late 1920s Hollywood). In this example, the canonized or “invisible” style of the past becomes the self-conscious and defamilarizing stylization of the present. This is the cycle of ostranenie : a defamilarizing trope emerges to combat our numbed perception of the world; gradually, we become accustomed to this new mode of seeing and it too becomes familiarized to our perceptual apparatus; at this point another defamiliarizing trope must emerge. (After a period of disuse, however, techniques may regain their defamiliarizing effects, like a lizard regenerating a lost tail.) The collection editor’s own contribution to Ostrannenie, “Ostranenie, ‘The Montage of Attractions’ and Early Cinema’s ‘Properly Irreducible Alien Quality’” is the anthology’s strongest primer on the historical formation and context of the concept’s emergence. van den Oever re-reads Shklovsky’s project as a manifesto …