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Cannibalizing Montage: Slicing, Dicing, and Splicing in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal

In Bryan Fuller’s television show Hannibal (2013–2015), the kitchen and dining room are represented as traditional spaces for the sociocultural experience of cooking and eating food; however, the deliberate use of editing techniques subverts the conventionality of these spaces by re-formalizing them as crime and murder scenes. Here I consider how Fuller’s Hannibal deploys editing and the concept of “collisional montage” to provoke a spatial nexus between murder and the kitchen, and thus cannibalism and eating animals. This collisional dynamic corresponds with the theorization of montage by Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein: “from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.” Following this theorem, I argue that in Fuller’s Hannibal, montage reformulates the monstrosity of cannibalism in its association with everyday meat-eating. Moreover, because intertextual and paratextual knowledge already informs viewers that Hannibal Lecter is a cannibal, I contend that the ambiguity of Lecter’s meals is less focused on the reprehensibility of cannibalism and is instead directed towards the conflicting association between cannibalism and everyday meat-eating. The use of montage in Fuller’s Hannibal is particularly significant in this context because editing practices cut across our intertextual and paratextual knowledge of “Hannibal the Cannibal” in order to problematize the aesthetic benevolence of his kitchen and dining table. The term montage in cinema conveys various meanings, from broad editing practices to specific dialectical theorizations. Generally speaking, the French term montage translates to mean cutting and is therefore often used to describe the craft of editing. Another broad-based use of the term montage is in the more conventional and familiar form of sequential montage, which is commonly used in American narrative cinema. Sequential montage truncates events occurring across an extended period of time and space into a short montage sequence, while using continuous non-diegetic music to maintain cohesion across the segment. By contrast, Soviet