Montage, in motion pictures, the editing technique of assembling separate pieces of thematically related film and putting them together into a sequence. With montage, portions of motion pictures can be carefully built up piece by piece by the director, film editor, and visual and sound technicians, who cut and fit each part with the others.
Visual montage may combine shots to tell a story chronologically or may juxtapose images to produce an impression or to illustrate an association of ideas. An example of the latter occurs in Strike (1924), by the Russian director Sergey Eisenstein, when the scene of workers being cut down by cavalry is followed by a shot of cattle being slaughtered.
Montage may also be applied to the combination of sounds for artistic expression. Dialogue, music, and sound effects may be combined in complex patterns, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), in which the word knife is repeated in the thoughts of a frightened girl who believes she has committed murder.
Montage technique developed early in cinema, primarily through the work of the American directors Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) and D.W. Griffith (1875–1948). It is, however, most commonly associated with the Russian editing techniques, particularly as introduced to American audiences through the montage sequences of Slavko Verkapich in films in the 1930s.
Text from Encyclopedia Britannica Written by: Robert Sklar
Visual montage may combine shots to tell a story chronologically or may juxtapose images to produce an impression or to illustrate an association of ideas. An example of the latter occurs in Strike (1924), by the Russian director Sergey Eisenstein, when the scene of workers being cut down by cavalry is followed by a shot of cattle being slaughtered.
Montage may also be applied to the combination of sounds for artistic expression. Dialogue, music, and sound effects may be combined in complex patterns, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), in which the word knife is repeated in the thoughts of a frightened girl who believes she has committed murder.
Montage technique developed early in cinema, primarily through the work of the American directors Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) and D.W. Griffith (1875–1948). It is, however, most commonly associated with the Russian editing techniques, particularly as introduced to American audiences through the montage sequences of Slavko Verkapich in films in the 1930s.
Text from Encyclopedia Britannica Written by: Robert Sklar
Sergey Eisenstein
Sergey Eisenstein, who excelled both as a director and as a teacher, based much of his theory of film on montage, which he compared to the compounding of characters in Japanese writing. The character for “dog” added to the character for “mouth,” he noted, results not merely in “dog’s mouth” but in the new concept of “bark”; similarly, film montage results in more than the sum of its parts. Still another great Russian director, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin, also stressed the importance of the carryover in the spectator’s mind. Only if an object is presented as part of a synthesis, he said, is it endowed with filmic life.
Three types of montage may be distinguished—narrative, graphic, and ideational. In narrative montage the multifarious images and scenes involve a single subject followed from point to point. In a fiction film, a character or location is explored from multiple angles while the audience builds a comprehensive image of the situation being explored or explained. Graphic montage occurs when shots are juxtaposed not on the basis of their subject matter but because of their physical appearance. Some avant-garde works depend on the spectator’s ability to match the graphic relations of assorted images, such as the people, the objects, and the shapes of numerical and alphabetical figures in Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique (1924) or the torpedoes, swimming seals, and blimps in Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958). In graphic montage, cutting usually occurs during shots of movement rather than ones of static action. This cutting on motion facilitates the smooth replacement of one image by the next. In ideational montage, two separate images are related to a third thing, an idea that they help to produce and by which they are governed. In Stachka(1924; Strike), for example, the director Eisenstein, to whom the theory of ideational montage is credited, effectively conveys the idea of slaughter by intercutting a shot of cattle being butchered with shots of workers being cut down by cavalry.
Text from Encyclopedia Britannica Written by: Robert Sklar
Three types of montage may be distinguished—narrative, graphic, and ideational. In narrative montage the multifarious images and scenes involve a single subject followed from point to point. In a fiction film, a character or location is explored from multiple angles while the audience builds a comprehensive image of the situation being explored or explained. Graphic montage occurs when shots are juxtaposed not on the basis of their subject matter but because of their physical appearance. Some avant-garde works depend on the spectator’s ability to match the graphic relations of assorted images, such as the people, the objects, and the shapes of numerical and alphabetical figures in Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique (1924) or the torpedoes, swimming seals, and blimps in Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958). In graphic montage, cutting usually occurs during shots of movement rather than ones of static action. This cutting on motion facilitates the smooth replacement of one image by the next. In ideational montage, two separate images are related to a third thing, an idea that they help to produce and by which they are governed. In Stachka(1924; Strike), for example, the director Eisenstein, to whom the theory of ideational montage is credited, effectively conveys the idea of slaughter by intercutting a shot of cattle being butchered with shots of workers being cut down by cavalry.
Text from Encyclopedia Britannica Written by: Robert Sklar
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