AS1;T4

Montage

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

French Film

Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s

Hollywood cinema

French Cinema

Montage has a literal French meaning (assembly installation) and simply identifies editing.

Soviet Film

In Soviet filmmaking of the 1920s “montage” was a method of juxtaposing shots to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.

Lev Kulshshov was on e the first to theorize about the relatively young medium of the cinema in the 1920s. He argued that editing a film is like constructing a building brick by brick the film is erected.  Kuleshov did an experiment that proves this point; he took an old film clip of a headshot of a noted Russian actor and inter-cut the shot with different images. When Kuleshov showed his film to people they praised the actor’s acting – the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the woman, and the grief when looking at the dead child.

The acting of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship, the audience was able to infer meaning from looking at the two shots. The experiment was the start of a technique known as Montage.

Sergwi Eisentein was shortly a student of Kuleshovs, but the two parted ways because they had different ideas of montage. contrasted unrelated shots Eisenstein tried to provoke associations in the viewer which were induced by shocks. In the clip below the unrelated shots show that the workers are angry, scared etc. 

               
In Hollywood cinema in a film is a short segment in a film which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion. for example in the clip below: Film makers may choose to include a montage to shorten the movie, or to make it more interesting.



I created two different types of montages

1. Soviet
2. Hollywood