Movie Makers (Jan-Dec 1930)

■=EB1»»JAK^ I930 CAMERA-ANGLING A SIDEWALK CAFE A Diverting Scene From Eugene Deslav's Montparnasse THE MONTAGE FILM Europe's Contrihution To The Art Of Editing THE French word, montage, is perhaps the most internationally accepted term for the film process which we call "cutting," or "editing." It refers to the arranging of images into a unified organic relationship. In Europe there has evolved, under the influence of the Russians, a special group of film creators whose work is known generically as "the montage film." The best-known of these workers is the Ukranian, Dzige Vertov, who made The Eleventh Year and The Man with a Camera, the latter known in America as Living Russia. Actually, this type of picture has its ancestry in the newsreel and the travel picture. Before the advent of the organized montage film we had, as we still have, films assembled or faked from the celluloid clippings of film libraries. Frequently, excerpts of newsreels are inserted in feature films but, instead of giving authenticity to the whole, they often intrude disturbingly different light densities and movements. An amateur might learn an enormous amount in film construction by assembling a film made up of diverse clippings, selected because of a relative unity of light, movement, imagery and theme. The montage film offers the amateur an independent opportunity. He takes his camera and does one of two things. He either collects a variety of unrelated shots which he may later join selectively into a film, or he decides upon a film and goes forth to discover the details which will comprise By Harry Alan Potamkin it. In the former instance, while there is no guiding intention of relationship, the amateur will probably find on looking through his library that he has enough shots which can be made into a short film. When he begins to "edit" this film he will be guided by the same method that controls the montage of the amateur who has chosen his theme prior to the shooting of the scene. However, the latter amateur will have acted more deliberately and wisely. He will first have prepared himself for the actual shooting by surveying his locale without his camera, recording in his mind's eye types of faces, categories of groups, settings, etc. Serge M. Eisenstein, tlie great Russian director of Potemkin and Ten Days that Shook the World, keeps a notebook in which he records types and their addresses so that he may reach them on need. Hollywood does the same with professional performers and the amateur can keep a similar notebook recording friends, scenes and other possible shots. Three professional films may serve as a starting point for a consideration of the montage film. The first is Alberto Cavalcanti's Only the Hours. I choose this first because it preceded the others in production, because it expresses best the principle of rhythm which defines the good montage film and because it has deeply influenced many young Parisian amateurs. Caval canti has three motifs in his film, alternating progressively — a news vendor moving through the streets, a drunken hag drav.'ing herself to the waterfront, the city about them. The interrelationship is fluid. One cannot separate the motifs while they are in progress. The amateurs who have been influenced by this film have often missed this principle of fluid interweaving. They have usually had a two-motif film — a simple undetailed story or episode with characters; the workaday city. But these two motifs are usually not dovetailed so that one feels they are inseparable. Moreover, the human episode is usually too insignificant for the proportions of the environment. This false scale of the motifs inflates the episode or crushes it. The second film is Berlin, a Symphony of a City, by Walter Ruttman and Karl Freund. Here the sequences are more sharply delineated one from the other. There is no motif that tells a story as in Only The Hours. Not individual human episodes but the City is the pattern. Only The Hours is romance; Berlin is document. Only The Hours is subjective; Berlin is objective. Both, however, are more than matterof-fact records; they are compositions. In Berlin, the city day is shown chronologically, the tempo increasing gradually to full speed, then closing abruptly. This is the city of human details but in the pattern, repeated at points, is a moving spiral, a store's ensign, which brings an abstract but moving