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

May, ipjp 11 Answer: No, that is not a montage. That is a single scene. A montage is created through inserted images. Question : In the picture Made For Each Other there was a scene of Carole Lombard running out of a night club. The camera was in front of her, moving away from her. She was running toward the camera, there were balloons and New Year favors, and men's arms and people's faces that flashed back and forth in front of her. It gave the effect almost of montage. Do you think it is .possible without editing or cutting the film in any way, by arranging the actual details and using the one camera to photograph it, that you can have the effects of montage ? Answer: I do not believe so. If we get only one impersonal view we do not get a strong, intense effect. If we are right in the midst of an action, if the camera becomes an omnipresent eye, seeing a scene from many dift'erent angles, by putting the separate shots together you get a much more intense effect. A single scene does not have life. A scene on the screen only lasts or has a life for about three or four seconds ; after that it goes flat. The first impression is fresh, new and alive. If you look at it for a long time it becomes dull. If there were no story or dialogue to carry it on, photographically and emotionally it would become dull. That is why we change angles continuously. I think an Englishman made a very interesting experiment with that. He made charts and diagrams to demonstrate how long a scene is interesting. Question : Is it true that stock shots play a great part in montage? Answer : Unfortunately ; but they are not shot in montage technique. They are shot very impersonally. It has been found that there should be a lot of movement in a montage scene. One remembers such exciting montage sequences. Stock shots are very long shots where you see a caravan away in the back moving, and nothing happens, and you have to keep it on the screen for a long time in order to convey what is going on. In montage you should see immediately what is happening and you should get a very graphic impression from it. Question : In the picture Topper Takes a Trip you see a figure disappear from the view of the audience on the screen. I understand this is done byf covering the person on the film with another piece of film and gradually blocking them out. Is that photo montage ? Answer: No, that is trick work. Montage is the use of the imagination in assembling various shots. Montage uses no camera tricks, but the only secret of montage is imagination. The shot that you speak about was explained very interestingly in Life Magazine. Although montage uses all the possibilities of the camera, it does not use them meaninglessly, but onl}^ when it is for the best. I believe in putting life into inanimate objects. I like to remember some of the scenes I did for a picture called Conqueror, where you saw coins piling up by themselves. That was done by letting the coins fall down, and I reversed the film so that they came up. But this has nothing to do with montage. Question : I think it is a great pity that we haven't got pictures to illustrate this talk. I see from the questions that we are not at all clear as to what montage is. Would you mind naming the montages you have done in pictures so that we will really be able to study the matter on the screen. Answer: One of the last ones was in the picture called Sweethearts. Jeanette MacDonald was separated from Nelson Eddy and they traveled in separate companies all over the country, singing. That covered a period of a year or so. I had to express that in about 250 feet of film. I had to prepare and make sketches. Thus I got the actors and the principals in the cast, some shots of the trains, curtains going up, and scenes from the shows they were singing" in, and shot all of those individually, separately. After that I cut the scenes together and got my effects by overlaps and superimpositions. This is done on a so-called optical printer, not a camera, which rephotographs the film. For such things I make a very precise diagram with explanatory charts for the nian who does the optical printing, telling him how to do it, and where to start to overlap from one scene to another. Shopzvorn Angel also has montage examples. In the beginning there is a sequence depicting the entry of the United States into the war. You