-French film
-Hollywood cinema
-Early Soviet filmmaking
Initially, montages were firstly used in Hollywood movies to compress a large amount of time into a small, quick series of clips to give you an idea of the passage of time and what has changed. Montages are used to shorten, maybe several months of training into just a few minutes of various methods that may have been used during the training or what the main character/s that were training were experiencing during that time.
In French film practice, 'montage' simply means 'assembly' or 'to edit' in French. The term simply identifies the process of editing in French film. It is just the use of frames to create a video sequence, unlike the Hollywood version which shortens down time. This is just the basic French word for editing film clips to create a full film.
In early Soviet filmmaking in the 1920s, 'montage' had a different meaning to French and Hollywood terms. Film makers started juxtaposing shots to create new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.
Lev Kuleshov did an experiment in 1920 when he was a young Soviet film maker.
He took an old head-shot picture of a noted Russian filmmaker and inter-cut the shot with different images that made the people being experimented on think of a meaning out of nowhere. This proved that people would find or create meaning out of two things put together even when they were not shown the real meaning.
Sergei Eisenstein also made a video which showed two different videos cut together that were used to give the audience an idea of what was happening to the strikers by using a cow butchery.
Hollywood cinema still uses its version of montage to remove large amounts of time such as when there are characters who are training for something, but to keep the audience entertained and interested, filmmakers remove all of the background story during the training time so that it becomes a quick and short but informative as it shows the struggles of that character through quick glimpses of them and their surroundings as they near the end of their training.
Summary:
French montage - to edit
Hollywood montage - to condense large amount of time
Soviet montage - to reveal a deep/hidden meaning
In my class we were also assigned into groups again (everyone partnered with the same people that they chose for the in-camera editing task) and we had to film our own montage scenes.
My group had filmed a short video of several scenes, but we stuck to our semi-comedic semi-serious videos and filmed out the quick scenes. As a result, there wasn't much to edit as we had cut out a lot of the editing just simply by filming such short clips.
The story of the video was that three characters, all students, had to study for an exam. Each of them were experiencing a different amount of stress, one was completely relaxed and seemed as if he didn't care, the second was slightly tense, but he felt as if he was ready and understood everything and the third (me) was the person who was experiencing the most amount of stress as he didn't pay much attention in classes and didn't understand half the stuff he wrote down.
Then as the exam day came, they all received their exam papers and got on with the exam, again, all showing different emotions during the exam, shown by their body positions.
We then all were given our results and it was kind of a confusing scene for some people because the person who tried the hardest revising got the middle-best grade, the person who revised a lot but didn't understand much of it received a "?" and the person who revised the least got the best mark, to which we all then filmed our responses (since I am the groups camera-man but was acting, Jess, the groups Director was filming and it wasn't the smoothest thing in the world) and the following scene was all of our expressions and emotions when we left school.
No comments:
Post a Comment