Task Four – Montage - Unit 16:P1,M1,D1

There are three different key meanings to the word 'montage' in film editing. The first of the key meanings is the French term, which stands for assembly, installation and simply identifies editing. The second of them is the soviet term, which can about in the soviet filmmaking of the 1920's, it was a method of juxtaposing shots to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone. The third and final key method is the hollywood term, which is when it is a montage sequence and is a short segment in a film in which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion to fit a long period of time into a short scene of the film.

There were two key filmmakers that done montages in early cinema, their names were Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein.

 Lev Kuleshov was among the very first to theorise about the relatively young medium of the cinema in the 1920's. He argued that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (Shot-by-shot) the building (film) is erected. He did an experiment that proves this point, he took an old film clip of a head shot of a Russian actor and inter-cut the shot with different images.When he showed the film to the people they praised the actors editing. The audience was able to infer the meaning from looking at two shots.

Sergei Eisenstein was breifly a study of Kuleshov's but the two parted ways because they had different ideas of montaging techniques. By contrasting unrealated shots Eisenstein tried to provoke associastions in the viewer, which were indulge by shocks.

 For example the film Strike was a Soviet montage as it showed you two clips within one another of a cow getting slaughter and workers fleeing the mines getting gunned down by soldiers. He tried to demonstrate the similarities of how those workers were being treated, to that of an animal.

In hollywood cinema a "montage sequence" is a short segment in a film which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion, for example Rocky's expersise scene before the fights. It is showing you a long period of training and improvement over a very short amount of time, which hollywood montage is, a long period of time, within a short clip.

The montage above is a soviet montage




Hollywood