AS1: Task 5: Montage

Montage

Montage:

 Is a technique used when editing, selecting and piecing together different sections of films to create a continuous whole. A montage is "a single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs". In film making they use this technique to compress time and to convey a lot of information in a relatively short period.

Methods of Montage:

The term montage has slightly different meaning when referred to in the following three contexts:

>French Films:

>Hollywood Cinema:

>Early Soviet film making:

Hollywood Style Montage:

An example of a Hollywood style montage is the Rocky movie.

The reason why film maker uses montage in their film is to compress time.

The French Montage:

In the french films, practice, 'montage' simply has its literal French meaning. Montage is French for 'assembly'. Therefore, in French film is the term simply identifies the process of editing.

Soviet Montage:

In the early soviet film making in the 1920's, 'montage' had a different meaning. The film makers started using juxtaposing (placing two deliberately contrasting images next to each other) shots to create a new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.

The idea of this came from the young Soviet film maker Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov experimented with films around 1920. He took an old film clip of a head shot of a rolled Russian actor and inter-cut the shot with different images.

This is what Kuleshov experimented. He combined two different images to create a third meaning. In each images he used one photo that is the same throughout the whole of the experiment. His experiment shows that the expression of the man on the photo changes every time it appeared, depending of what he was 'looking at'. On this pictures  (shown above) can be the plate of soup, the girl in the coffin or the woman on the divan and this could show and expression of hunger, grief or desire, respectively.

Another person who experimented with this is Charlie Chaplin. He used two different images that has the same meaning.

For example, he used a picture of sheep and a picture of workers going through the stairs off to work. 

The images has the same meaning as the sheep are being controlled by the sheep dog and its owner. Whereas, the workers are off to work that they don't really like but they are to go there for a living.

Strike by Eisenstein

Scenes from  'Strike'

                                                                Strike! by Eisenstein

 A shots of a butcher slaughtering cattle is used to suggest the Russian Troops were mistreating the striking workers. The similarities between the dead cow and the soldiers marching is that when the cow is being slaughter by the butcher same time the soldiers are moving as they are about to die.