Montage is a confusing term because, like love, it means different things to different people. Other documentary styles emerged in which editorial intervention was minimal, if never entirely absent. For example, though some documentarists saw editing as a way to make their anthropological visions appear more interesting, others saw minimal intrusion as the more authentic way to go. Some filmmakers chose to minimize editing, seeing it as the "death of 1,000 cuts" for realism. We immediately cut back to Charlie emerging in the midst of the crowd: the one black sheep in the fold. There is one black ram in the middle of the herd. In Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a shot of a faceless, crowded group of men emerging from a subway on their way to work is followed by a shot of a herd of sheep being led to slaughter. Montage was a way to put together a number of shots, more or less quickly, in a manner that pointed out a moral or an idea. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, who saw montage principally as a useful propaganda film tool. The first rigorous use of the term is by Soviet filmmakers like V.I. Though the idea of putting together shots to forward theme as well as action?one way of seeing montage?had occurred to other filmmakers before Griffith and the early Soviets, Griffith made it a regular practice and the Russian filmmakers theorized its meaning. One of the most notable of the Soviet directors of this era was Sergei Eisenstein, who transformed the principles of classical editing into something more consciously intellectualized he called montage. The Moscow Film School of the 1920s, for example, played his Intolerance (1916) over and over again in order to use Griffith's techniques for the films of its students. So much so that he influenced the art of editing worldwide. Here we can just note that, though he did not invent any of the editing techniques he used, he made them emotionally and thematically significant. Lenin's way?Marxism?was so controversial in the early part of the century that the United States and Western Europe blockaded Russia after that country's communist revolution. Griffith and Beyondĭid you know that the first real film school in the world?the Moscow Film School?was founded as a propaganda device? Lenin knew early on that the cinema was going to be an important ideological tool for communicating ways of seeing the world. In movies he is making at the turn of the century, Georges Mlis stops the camera after detonating a magic puff of smoke in front of his actor, then begins the camera again after the actor has left the stage, making it seem as if the actor has magically vanished. This kind of editing could allow for some early special effects. You can see primitive instances of editing in films like Rescued by Rover (Great Britain, 1904) and The Great Train Robbery (1903).Įarly on the cuts were made in the camera, so that the cameraman would simply stop cranking at the exact end of a shot, and begin cranking again when it was moved somewhere else, or when something else was put in front of it. However, filmmakers quickly discovered that editing shots into a sequence not only contributed to the audience's sense of tale, but also enabled them to tell more complex stories as a result. Sequence: A number of shots edited together and unified, either through the plot, the character(s), the time and/or space, or the theme. A shot consists of the celluloid used from the moment a camera begins rolling on a scene to the moment it stops. Shot: The basic temporal unit of film photography and editing.
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