Montage Epic in John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea: The Politics and Aesthetics of Multiscreen Narrative

The article discusses the multiscreen visual narrative of black British artist
John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015). In order to appreciate contemporary
multiscreen aesthetics it first discusses the criticism on the relationship
between narrative – intended as a universal structure – and transmedial
narrative. It then offers a brief overview of multiscreen video art to
contextualise Akomfrah’s work, and finally an analysis of Akomfrah’s film,
focusing on the special use of montage and literature in it. Vertigo Sea
envisages aspects of the violence of modernity in its dramatic imbrication
with the sea (the slave trade, Mediterranean migration, whale hunting and
more). As the work combines archival material, fragments of films and original
shots of sublime seascapes dovetailed with quotations from classics of
literature and philosophy, the article reflects on the extent to which the
assemblage enables an original reformulation of narrative and narrator in
the digital medium, and envisages it as a special form of epic, a multiscreen
montage epic.