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gether, then a last one, very far away. When the latter had ceased to sound, he thought, 'It is all over. It is a failure. She won't come.'
"He had made up his mind, however, to wait till daylight. In these matters one must be patient.
"He heard the quarter strike, then the half-hour, then the quarter to, and all the clocks repeated 'one,' as they had announced midnight. . . ."
We see from this example that when Maupassant had to impress on the reader's consciousness and sensations the emotional content of midnight, he did not confine himself to merely stating that the clocks struck twelve and then one. He made us live through the sensation of midnight by making different clocks in different places strike twelve. The twelve strokes coming from different parts combined in our perception to produce the general sensation of midnight. The individual representations blended into an image. And this is achieved by strictly montage means.
This is an example of the subtlest use of montage with the sound image of "midnight" presented in a series of pictures from different camera angles: "distant," "nearer," "very far away." The striking of the clocks is given from different distances, just as an object shot from various camera set-ups and repeated consecutively in three different shot-pieces: "long shot," "medium shot" and "distant shot." Maupassant does not pass off these different striking clocks as a naturalist detail of Paris at night: he describes this chorus to depict "the fateful hour" and not merely to inform that it is "12 midnight."
Had Maupassant intended to impart this information he would hardly have had recourse to such elaborate writing. And he would not have been .able to produce such strong emotional effect by such simple means if he had not chosen the montage solution for his artistic problem.
When I speak of clocks and hours I invariably recall an instance from my own work. When we were filming October in the Winter Palace in 1927, we came across a very interesting old clock. Its main dial was wreathed by small dials showing the time in Paris, London, New York, etc., in addition to the Moscow (or was it Petersburg? — I don't remember now) time on the big dial. The clock impressed itself on my memory and when I was seeking for means to drive home with utmost forcefulness the historic moment of victory and the establishment
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