Task Four – Montage

Task Four – Montage

The 3 key meanings of montage are:

• French Cinema  - the word 'montage' is French, in french cinema it simply means to assemble. Basically, the form of montage in this instance is just editing, for example the basics of when a film is put together. Effects and clips being put together also fall under this.

• Soviet Cinema - Soviet Cinema was used in the 1920's, it is used by putting two shots juxtaposed together to help the audience understand what the footage is trying to convey. These montages were used at the time to indoctrinate people for propaganda purposes. The meaning was not behind these two shots on their own the two shots had very little to do with each other however, the directors put the shots together to create a new meaning. There were two main soviet film directors, these are Lev Kuleshov and Sergel Elsestiein. Lev Kuleshov, was a leader in the theory of the Soviet montage, he developed these theories of editing. The main essence of the cinema  for Kuleshov was editing, as explained above as the juxtaposition of one shot with another. He showed this idea and he created what is known as the Kuleshov Experiment. This is a now famous form of editing, showing how different editing changes can change the viewers perception and interpretation of the images shown, by shots of actors being intercepted with different meaningful images. Sergei Eisenstein was another Soviet Montage film director and a film theorist. Sergei is often described as the "father of montage". He is most known for his silent films, Strike and October,  are examples of this. I have embedded an example of his work, Strike above. Which shows a typical Soviet Montage, playing shots of people running away against a cow being slaughtered.

• Hollywood Cinema - a Hollywood montage is short sequence in a film, which shortens the length of an action for example a month of training into a short minute clip of different actions that have happened through the month. It gives you a brief outlook of something that happened over a long time. An example of this is in the film Rocky that I have added below, it shows Rocky training to improve for a fight. 

      This is our attempt at a Soviet montage, as you can see from the video we showed a shot  of a general chat between two people, then intwinned between these clips there are shots of how the person is reacting to what is being said. The meaning behind the montage is two play the emotion the person is feeling next to the normal conversation, so you can tell what they are thinking of the the conversation. It went well, you can tell that we was making the video in a soviet montage style. What could have been better is we could of made it more obvious what the emotions were and what was going on.

The second type of montage we created was a hollywood montage, our idea was to take a typical day at our school and speed it up as if the character is waiting all day just for the final bell to ring, so he can go home. A school day lasts about 6 hours, so we attemped to give the audience a brief idea of everything that would happen during the day. We could have improved the montage by showing and making the time of the day and passing of time more obvious. However we showed the audience a short clip which shows a lot of what the character would do throughout the day, the video was successful because of this.