National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1939 - Jan 1942)

May, /pjp 9 one on top of another — so-called superimposed shots — to depict an event, to suggest lapse of time, to convey an idea, to arouse an emotion, to express a state of mind or create a mood or atmosphere. This mounting of images, besides being expressive, must possess a certain visual right." Now, montage is a form of putting strips of film together. Well, regular production editing is montage in a general way, but there is a slight difference. Production cutting, editing, which is called "continuity cutting," strives to be as unobtrusive as possible, unnoticed. It strives to make a story run smoothly. I will give a simple example. Suppose we have a long shot of a man entering a room and sitting at a desk and picking up a telephone. Now, you would show a long shot of that in the regular production manner, and a closer shot of the man at the telephone. So, gradually coming to the picking up of the telephone from the long shot you would cut to the close shot of the man sitting at the desk; then a closeup of him picking up the telephone and talking. By contrast, montage uses cuts as a definite element in creating an effect. If in montage you wanted to emphasize the importance of this man telephoning, you would cut immediately from an extreme long shot to a very close shot of the man at the telephone, to jar the audience, to get a kick out of the cut. Comparing it with a sound, I would say that continuity cutting is like the roll of a drum. While in. montage it is like beating of the drum, where you get a sense of rhythm out of each beat. The simplest form of montage is that depicting an event which usually consists of very violent physical action or movement. Earthquakes, wars, riots and so on. Now, these are done in a so-called analytical way. Our minds when visualizing a scene are used to visualizing it in a sort of impersonal way, as though it were someone singing on a stage. When you try to think of a scene like a war scene, your first impulse is to think of it as an event, seeing it away from you, as on a stage, impersonal. In order to make it much more intense it is necessary to become more omnipresent with a camera, to get into it and list the action from so many different angles. By putting these together you get a much more intense effect, rather than a very impersonal view. Now, there is a more complicated, socalled "ideological," montage that tries to express an idea. When you strike a note on the piano the note by itself does not mean a thing. If after that you strike another note, the second note becomes aft'ected by the first one. The two notes put together create a part of a melody, if they are harmoniously related. Such a thing happens in montage. Your individual shots may not mean a thing, but when they are put together each subsequent shot is affected by the preceding one. A famous Russian director, I believe, made an interesting experiment. He shot a scene of a man just staring ahead, just thinking. I believe he even gave him a mathematical problem in order to get the tension there. The problem was, "How much is three times 295 ?" and while the man was weighing that, he photographed him. Then he cut the scene in two, into a first part and a second part. The scene contained no action, just a man staring ahead and thinking. In between the first and second parts he cut in a thought of a plate of food. So on the screen we saw first, the man thinking, second, the cut of the plate of food, and third, the man thinking again. But the second shot had actually introduced something new. It had been affected by the preceding shot. You had the impression that the man was actually hungry, thinking of food. This is like music; the following note is affected by the preceding note, and each subsequent scene is affected by its predecessor. Then the director used the same closeup of the man thinking, and cut in between the first and second part a shot of a very good looking woman. Now the closeup followed the picture of the woman and it acquired a new expression. You felt that the man was in love with the woman and was thinking and dreaming about her. That is how shots affect each other in montage. He also tried putting a shot between of a dead body on the floor. At once something sinister appeared in the following closeup,