Montage

Montage

It literally means editing, in french anyway. It means to assemble & editing. When we say montage, it is a very vague term that can mean a lot of things. So that's my we break it down by putting words in front of it such as, intellectual, soviet and musical. We're going to concentrate on the intellectual and soviet forms of montage.

Soviet Montage is something that the Soviets experimented with in the early 20th Century (obviously.) After 1917, Lenin came into power over the Tsar. Shortly afterwards, in 1919, he create the State Film School. Why did he do this? Compared to paintings, films are hugely powerful. i don't mean to slate all you art fans but paintings can't be copied thousands of times over and be shown to millions of people simultaneously across the world. At the time, painting was the only competition film had.

This new film school was by now full of keen students who were teaching themselves technically. Nearly all of the students were theorists themselves; there was the old Kuleshov and his apprentice Pudovin and there was Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.

Kuleshov and Pudovin were the two who experimented with narrative, whilst Dziga Vertov experimented with Soviet Montage (could be intellectual) and Eisenstein experimented with what he called Intellectual Montage.

Kuleshov stated that editing was like making a wall out of bricks. He also like the equation A +B = AB. Eisenstein said that Montage editing makes A+B = C.

So Montage is producing a composite out from fragments, i.e. pictures, texts and music. Where would you see all this? Beginning credits of a film are mostly montage, par example, The Victors beginning title sequence is an amazing example of really good use of montage.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=p9nPOMU1xml = Title sequence from "The Victors"

But where else do we see Montage? Music Videos, advertisements and sports channels. Montage can be misunderstood sometimes to be rapid editing, such as in "Rocky" where Rocky is training up. Here we jump cut to the interesting parts of his training.

Napoleon Dynamite

This film's beginning titles are a good example of montage editing.

We see a catalogue of objects to do with Secondary School. We have; junk food, plates, kiddy like drawings, a wallet with a UFO abduction insurance card in it, etc. We can tell that this film is going to be centered around youth and pop culture that come from secondary schools.

Intellectual Montage

This is the editing style where the viewer has to think about the shots. It's hard stuff if you want to relax to a decent movie. To get the meanings in "Man With a Movie Camera" (Dziga Vertov) you must watch it at least eight times apparently (ahh great.)

The great pioneer in this form of editing is Sergei Eisenstein though. Sergei liked conflict in his work. A juxtapose was always welcome with Mr Eisenstein. Analytical Editing is all about the flow of shots, Intellectual Montage is all about the collision from still to moving, from colour to B&W, from violent to soft. You could say that rather that demonstrative, Eisentstein was associative. Unlike Dziga Vertov though, Eisenstein still had narrative in his films.

Eisenstein had a cool idea though, he started including non-diegetic material into his films. Non-diegetic means that it does not come from the world that the film is set in. One example of non-diegetic material is the soundtrack. Sometimes the music can be diegetic in that it may be coming out of a stereo within the world the film exists in. But you would not have a shot of say The Eiffel Tower in Napoleon Dynamite unless Napoleon or some other character was going to Paris. 'Apocalypse Now''s diegetic world was that of Vietknam, only it was actually filmed in the Philippines. The Spagetti Westerns diegetic world was the Wild Wild West when infact they were in either Italy or somewhere near Madrid.

Eisenstein also legitimized repetition of shots that was seen before as a real bad accident. Dziga Vertov does this to the extreme in his films. Eisenstein also breaks the space and time barrier that Continuity films have. This smashed the coherence where the film existed.

Strike 

This film came out on the 28th April in 1925 (within the Soviet Union.) It happens to be one of Eisenstein's first films he made, oddly as it is quite good.

the plot is that at the end of the film the factory workers who are rebelling against the big daddies are crushed by the police on horses. There is horrific violence, a small child is dropped from a huge height and dies.

There is a montage sequence when the workers are nearly all dead. We first see a knife coming down on something, then we return to the fight scene within the factory. The we cut do a random abattoir where there are cows being gutted and slaughtered horrifically. This draws the parallel between the two. The workers are being slaughtered like animals.

Eisenstein's Essay on Montage

From the book Film Theory & Criticism page 127.

Japanese Cinema has everything it needs for film making; massive corporations, good actors and stories yet it does not know what montage is. Why is this when cinematography is first and foremost montage. How strange this is as Japanese calligraphy is made up of symbols that when added together they make a new meaning. This is what montage is, putting A+B = C. For example, if you read the Guardian you will know that 'person' + 'tree' = rest and that 'person' + 'earth' = to sit down.

Hieroglyphs have been around 2700 years and have evolved from simple shapes representing real things cut out with a stylus on bamboo, to indian ink on paper. The chinese word "Ma" meaning horse, has evolved 14 times to get to its present state. It's first state looks almost exactly like a rearing horse.

In Japanese, if you have 'ear' added with

• a dog = to listen
• a dog and a mouth = to bark
• a mouth and a bird = sing
• a mouth and a child - scream

You would have thought that the Japanese and Chinese would have been amazing at Montage (this was written in 1929 remember.) These symbols combine contexts into concepts. Well, they did make Pokemon out of Pocket + Monster.

Japanese Poetry

Haiku / Hokku both coming from Haikai are forms of Japanese Poetry. It is little more than hieroglyphs transposed into phrases / ideograms.

Here is some Haiku for you.

A lonely crow

On leafless bow

One Autumn leaf BASHO

What a resplendent moon

It casts the shadow of pine boughs

Upon the mats KIKAKU

An evening breeze blows

The water ripples

Against the blue heron's legs BUSON

It is early dawn

The castle is surrounded

By the cries of wild ducks YOROKU

Yeah it's a bit confusing, i think each word in capitals means what the phrase is saying, i dunno.

The earlier 'tanka' is longer (by two lines.)

O mountain pheasent

Long are the feathers trail'st thou

On the wooded hill-side

As long the nights seem to me

On lonely couch sleep seek HITOMARO [?]

Anyway, these are montage lists. There is emotional qualities about these poems "it is the readers who make the Haiku's imperfection a perfection of art." (Yone Nobuchi.) It is uncertain whether Japanese writing is denotive/depictive, that is characters/graphics.

A series of shots placed in random places

1. Clutching Hands (CU)
2. MS of a struggle
3. Extreme CU of bulging eyes

These are the same as Haiku. i think that Haiku creates images in our minds though and not imposing them. This means that the brain could link all of these images to the same diegetic world. What do you think my readers?

But this is of course a disproportionate representation of an event none the less.

Ancient Times

Disproportion in images has happened since the ancient times. Say you had a stone age man drawing a king and his minions in some rock. The king would be bigger than his minions disproportionately. If something is in the distance compared with a person or object in the drawing, whatever is far away will be drawn closer to the person or object that is in the foreground.

Is it fair to say then that absolute realism is not the best way of representation? A Japanese portrait artist drew his clients faces disproportionately to the rest of their features was a man called Shakaru. They were still recognizable but they were out of proportion.

Shot Theory

A shot = a single piece of celluloid that is in a rectangle frame that depicts a segment of an event. Put together, these make a montage. This is done in a very appropriate rhythm "of course." This is the brick by brick / screw by screw way of looking at montage that Kuleshov thought was the best way.

"The shot is an element of montage. Montage is an assembly of these elements."

But this has a limit of what can be done. It's like saying that street-cars were made to be laid across a street. So what characterises shots? Is it harmony or collision? Have we gone over this before?

Kuleshov made mistakes in his last film (according to Eisenstein let's remember) by stagnating this already refined way of editing (the narrative way) in his film [The Gay Canary.]

"The shot is not an element of montage, it is a montage cell" and cells make organisms.

Pudovin (linkage) vs Eisenstein (collision.) With linkage you have narrative, but with collision arrives concepts. Conflict is the basis for every art form around, including montage. Montage is a phalanx of shots compared to the explosions of a car engine driving forward.

Cinematographical Conflicts

are

• Close Shots vs Long Shots : Such as in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
• Conflict of graphical directions : Such as in Psycho's shower scene
• Conflict of scales
• of volumes (light intensity)
• of masses
• of dpeths.
• an object and its dimensions
• an event and its duration (could be achieved with a distorted lens and stop/slow motion.)
• Conflict in he sound, acoustics vs optics
• A great and fascinating conflict is between the frame of a shot and its object.

Kabuki

Japanese Theatre. This art form uses makeup to show transitions between mental states e.g. drunkenness and madness. in film, this is done with lighting / makeup if you like. Kabuki also uses slow movement and breakdown in movement i.e sometimes an actor will only use an arm or a leg

But instead of looking to their language and their Haikai / haiku, the Japps make the same mistake as Kabuki. It looks to making adaptaiond og yjr spongy shapelessness of our own "inner" naturalism. It's the internation commercail film race that has done this to Japan. But Japan, this is your task, not ours [the Russians] 

1929