Saturday 8 January 2011

Understanding montage and parallel action

This excellent video essay takes 'Inception' and relates it's key storytelling device, parallel editing, to cinema pioneer DW Griffith. But how do Griffith and parallel editing relate to 'montage'?




When one scene follows another again we construct a meaning from their juxtaposition. We have learnt to do this. Similarly when 2 shots are juxtaposed (placed next to each other) we look for a connection or meaning between them. It’s the association of the 2 images that creates meaning for the Viewer. (There can also be a juxtaposition within a single frame too.) We take this so for granted today that as a result it’s sometimes not easy for us to actually decide why some arrangements of images, shots and scenes work better than others. To edit we need to use these ideas since they are the basis of how to assemble a visual story. If we see the shot of a building followed by a woman at a desk we assume that she’s working in the building. This is a learned response developed over time.



The first films of the Lumiere Brothers were single reel, single shot snippets of live or staged action. These would be shown as a collection projected for an audience. George Melies effectively used what we would call ‘in camera’ editing for his theatrical magic shots that showed objects and people disappearing and reappearing. The actual film wasn’t cut and rejoined, he merely cleverly started and stopped the camera.



Until 1902, all scenes were shot in one take from beginning to end. If there was a problem with the take, then the whole thing would be re shot. The audience saw what the film maker had seen, one continuous unbroken piece of action from a single, eye level, all encompassing (wide) view. A direct copy from the theatrical experience. This meant that films were short, 2 − 3 minutes long. Few films were even broken into scenes. But Edison employee, Edwin S. Porter, a resourceful Projectionist, took what he already had - footage of fire companies in action - and combined it with footage he’d filmed, into a single event for ‘The life of an American Fireman’. The juxtaposition suggested that these events were connected and had happened at the same time. By joining separate scenes together his ‘transition’ (a dissolve) released cinema from the constraint of space and ushered in the use of editing as a way of telling the story. The edits served to make the film much more dramatic too. People would now engage more directly with film.



In his next film ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903) he cut directly from one scene to another as well as showing simultaneous action by cutting from scene to scene, now know as ‘cross cutting’. People understood that the action shown was happening at the same time. What seems odd to us now is that Porter and others failed to take this technique further and use the cut within the scene. In 1908 he directed DW Griffith in ‘Rescued from the eagle’s nest’. It was Griffith, as a Director, who would take the limelight and cinematic storytelling further that same year.

In spite of his Producers’ concern that the audience ‘wouldn’t pay for half an actor’, in the middle of the action in ‘For love of gold’, Griffith cut from a wide angle to a close up. Importantly the audience understood the cut since it was the same scene from the same camera angle. A year later in ‘After many years’ he cut to a close up of an actress then to the object of her thoughts.




Griffith carried on innovating and for ‘The lonely villa’ (1909) in an attempt to increase the dramatic effect he ‘inter cut’ between the woman and children hiding inside, the bandits outside the villa, and the husband racing home. All the action was within the same scene. Three lines of action were shown, and their screen time bore little relation to real or likely time. All his cinematic storytelling techniques paved the way for longer films - Birth of a Nation and his masterpiece ‘Intolerance’. This film was to have a huge affect on the development of ‘montage’ developed by Russian Directors, most famous of whom was Sergei Eisenstein.

‘All that is best in Soviet film has it’s origins in ‘Intolerance’ Sergei Eisenstein.



The technique of juxtaposing images has come to be known as ‘montage’, named by Eisenstein from the French meaning ‘assembly’. Montage is used to refer to the associative or intellectual juxtaposition of images. In his quest to deconstruct film-art, theorist Lev Kuleshov’s experiments explored the associative powers of juxtaposition and stressed the role of the editing in their combination.

Lev Kuleshov (http://www.thefullwiki.org/Lev_Kuleshov)

In one experiment Kuleshov used what is now know as the ‘three shot sequence’. He took a piece of film of the actor Muzhukhin with a deadpan expression. He then cut in 3 successive ‘insert’ images; a bowl of soup, a small child and an old woman in a coffin. Then it cut back to Muzhukhin for a ‘reaction’ shot. When viewers saw the cut from Muzhukhin to the insert shot it to be what he was seeing, his POV. The viewers failed to notice that the footage of Muzhukin before and after the insert shot was identical. Instead they were struck by his 'subtle but convincing portrayal' of 3 emotions - hunger for the soup, joy at the child and remorse for the old woman, in the reaction shots. Since there was no acting in the sequences Kuleshov argued that the meaning must have been created in the Viewers’ minds purely by the juxtaposition of uninflected images. By changing the experiment to include different reaction shots he found that the meaning of the sequence could be altered by the shot order. (Smiling - gun - frowning = fear, frowning - gun - smiling = bravery).



Vsevolod Pudovkin (http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ruwiki/34522)


Within Soviet Montage there were a number of schools of thought. These were particularly characterised by two ex students of Kuleshov’s; Pudovkin and Eisenstein. Podovkin went on to develop his own ‘5 editing principles’ based on montage theory and juxtaposition:
  • 1. Contrast
  • 2. Parallelism
  • 3. Symbolism. Cutting from one shot to a completely different shot that in some way symbolises the action/character in the first
  • 4. Simultaneity. This creates tension in the viewer since 2 actions on screen at the same time lead to an outcome that will connect both on screen
  • 5. ‘Leit - motif’ - a reinteration of theme. The repetition of shots or a sequence to reinforce the theme

In 1925 both were charged with making a film about the Revolution. Pudovkin’s family based ‘Mother’ favoured the smooth montage and 'relational editing' of shots that maintained some continuity in time and space, following the route of Griffith.

Mother 1926




While Eisenstein’s grand symphony ‘Potemkin’ favoured more ‘dialectical’ editing, extending the juxtaposition further and abandoning any semblance continuity and providing a shock or jolt. The dialectic is argued using contrast and irony. His ‘collision’ of images used conflictional content, still/dynamic, screen direction, large/small, dark/light, real time/perceived time. He was particularly keen to exploit editing’s ability to create it’s own sense of time, or ‘film time’, drawing out and dramatising particular moments. He also popularised the use of very short shots.

Potemkin 1926



Griffiths, Pudovkin and Eisenstein were all keen on literature and looked to literature to provide them with scenarios and stories (they were particularly keen on Charles Dickens) not so Dziga Vertov. His approach to film and montage was different again…but that’s another story.

‘Temporal ellipsis’ is an editing device that might be confused with montage. In Hollywood and in scriptwriting formatting, this technique is often referred to as a ‘montage’. It is used to compress time, and is visibly seen to do so. It lies in the area between montage and continuity cutting. Filmic time is shortened or speeded up primarily to move the story forward, so unimportant items are omitted - ellipsis.