Didi-Huberman treats the montage of images as a reconstructive, critical and consequently political tool. It involves disassembling and assembling fragments (of an image and text) in different constellations in search of contrasts, relationships and new meanings. The montage is both a way to create sequences and narratives and a tool to break an image of reality and a discourse. In his book Images malgré tout, the author struggles with the impotence of imagination and the illegibility of images, which, however, are testimony to the demanding efforts of confrontation and imagination. They represent an important and controversial subject of the politics of memory. The analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s diaries shows a second – critical and deconstructive – aspect of montage. Photographs and texts compiled by Brecht in Arbeitsjournal and Kriegsfibel undermine their previous significance, causing shock and forcing viewers to adapt their attitudes towards them.
Images acquire meaning and expression along with other images and texts; they require knowledge and imagination, otherwise they are just incomprehensible views. They do not represent a final, whole and individual truth. They stimulate thinking and imagining; they can allow us to build a narrative, understand an event, distance ourselves from the surrounding, feel a sense of strangeness and alienation, and at the same time – through provocation – produce a critical engagement. The montage of images does not allow us, however, to adopt a position from which we can settle things (prises de parti). Its political value involves destabilization of the existing discourse, revealing cracks and a troubling picture of reality. It is a moment of orientation through the confrontation of different elements of a perspective taken (prises de posición).