Montage in Four Forms

FS1: Exploring Film Form Micro Elements Editing

Montage (in Four Forms) As soon as a film is made of more than one shot, editing comes into play. When one shot does not simply follow another and their juxtaposition has a dynamic significance, one speaks not of editing but of montage. The French term for simple continuity editing is decoupage; it denotes “ordinary” sequential cutting, where one shot follows another in a linear, easy-to-follow manner. Montage - from the French verb monter, “to ascend, mount, or assemble” – denotes the way one shot is mounted next to another, but it has the connotation of an ascending or heightened effect. Montage, then, is the art of assembling individual shots into a dynamic system.

1. Rapid cutting QuickTimeª and a TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor are needed to see this picture.

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all the shots from the infamous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

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There are four commonly used varieties of montage. The first, and the most familiar, is rapid cutting: a great many shots follow one another in a short period of time. This can create a shock rhythm and can feel like an avalanche of images. Its primary function is rhythmic, and it is often used to heighten the audience’s sense of dramatic urgency or to realise the energy of a climax. One of the most startling and violent examples of rapid cutting occurs in Ménilmontant. In less than 40 seconds more than 50 shots present the axe murders with horrifying suddenness. The shower murder in Psycho provides a similar example from the sound period.

2. Linkage editing The second variety of montage is linkage editing, a structure primarily associated with the work of Pudovkin, both in his theoretical writings and in his film Mother (1926). As the term suggests, individual shots are joined together to present a whole; they are linked into a system. (This is also called constructive editing, as if shots were bricks.) Linkage editing is far more fragmented and dynamic than normal continuity editing, because the individual shots, to some degree, retain their integrity as autonomous units or work on their own to create meaning, whereas those in continuity editing tend to flow together. Although continuity editing is the single most common type of editing, it is often excluded from the category of montage because it is at pains to ‘hide’ the cuts so that the audience will not become aware of them. In true montage, shot juxtapositions are deliberately called to the audience’s attention.

Sergei Eisenstein

3. Dialectical Montage The third is dialectical montage (sometimes called intellectual montage), primarily a style associated with Sergei Eisenstein but still practiced by Nicolas Roeg, Alain Resnais and others. Rather than liking with each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the shots in a dialectical montage collide. They do not fit easily with each other but appear to be in conflict, and the audience must reason out what these shots have to do with each other. D.W.Griffith used dialectical montage as a structuring principal in Intollerance (though he had no special name for it), telling four separate stories among which the audience had to discover a common theme.

In Strike (1925) Eisenstein offered a shot of a slaughtered animal and then a shot of massacred strikers, the animal had nothing to do with the plot of Strike, but the two shots, taken together, implied that the workers had been not simply attacked but slaughtered like cattle, or that the workers are cattle.

4. Hollywood Montage The forth is Hollywood montage, where the images overlaps they succeed each other. In the previous three types, the images are separated by straight cuts: without any special bridging device, one shot ends, then the next begins. Hollywood montage ‘softens’ the abrupt transitions of classical montage, providing a series of double (or more) exposures, usually accompanied by music rather that dialogue, and generally used to give a whirlwind impression of an even or an overview of a a transition between scenes. Examples, in Citizen Kane the essence of Susan’s operatic career is shown in such a montage, in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Apocalypse Now a journey is shortened and summarised by Hollywood montage.

Montage and mise-en-scene overlap in multiple exposure and split-screen. The term Abel Gance coined to describe both of these was polyvision (any image made up of several images). What makes polyvision different from other varieties of montage is that its juxtapositions are simultaneous rather than successive or sequential; still, it may be thought of as montage within the frame or montage as mise-en-scène

Re-cap of terms related to Montage

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Rapid Cutting Linkage Editing Constructive Editing Continuity Editing Dialectical Montage Intellectual Montage Hollywood Montage Découpage Montage Polyvision (Abel Gance) Straight Cuts Split-Screen Multiple Exposure Subjective Camera (P.O.V.)