How to Cite

Quagliati, Noemi: Flying Filming: Der Reihenbildner and Aerial Photomontage, in Boskamp, Ulrike et al. (Eds.): Pasted Topographies, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2023 (Terrain. Studies on Topographic Visual Media, Volume 1), p. 157–190. https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.1323.c18469

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https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.1323
ISBN 978-3-98501-239-8 (PDF)

Published

12/20/2023

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Authors

Noemi Quagliati

Flying Filming

Der Reihenbildner and Aerial Photomontage

The Reihenbildner was the first German film camera able to map territories from an aeroplane. Designed by the cinema pioneer Oskar Messter for the German Air Force in 1915, this device became crucial in military surveying, as the overlapping film images allowed the best substitute for a map to be produced as quickly as possible. The “flying cinematograph,” as the German press nicknamed the Reihenbildner, was an apparatus of visual intelligence in World War I. This essay analyses the process of recording, assembling, and propagandising topographies in Germany. Moreover, it compares the technique of military aerial photomontage with the more celebrated experimentation of Dadaist photomontage. Unlike the dynamic and explosive multiperspectivism of avant-garde practices, aerial photo maps offer a static and uniform space dominated by sequential sectioning rather than fragmentation. Therefore, mapping realised by the Reihenbildner suggests a novel interpretation of montage as a metaphor for modernity.

Noemi Quagliati received a PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2021 on the subject of landscape photography in WWI Germany. Over the last years, she has been a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Georgia, and at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Deutsches Museum, where she has collaborated on modernizing the museum’s historical aviation section by investigating the topic of aerial photography. She has been offered research grants from the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research at RWTH Aachen University and is the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship with the project Bird's-Eye Views of the Venetian Lagoon. Planetary Visions and Birdscapes of an Aquatic Ecosystem, which will begin in 2024 at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.