Theoretical discussion on montage

Griffith and his successors did not want to summarize or explore the laws and theories of montage. The first person to explore montage seriously was Soviet director Kuleshov and his students Eisenstein and pudovkin. Their theories in turn influenced film theorists and artists in Europe and America.

Eisenstein

Eisenstein has a famous saying about montage theory: "The juxtaposition of two montage shots is not the sum of two numbers, but the product of two numbers." In the words of Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs, "Once the upper and lower shots are connected together, the extremely rich meanings hidden in each shot are emitted like sparks." For example, in "The Rural Female Teacher", varvara answered "forever", and then took two shots of cuttlefish branches, which had a meaning that did not exist alone, expressing the feelings of the author and the characters in the play.

Eisenstein applied dialectics to montage theory, emphasizing the conflict between contrast shots. For him, a shot is not an "independent thing". Only when it collides with the opposite shot can it arouse emotional feelings and understand the theme. He believes that a single shot is just an "image", and only by fusing these images can a meaningful "image" be formed. It is this "montage power" that makes the combination of shots not a brick narrative, but a "highly excited and emotional narrative". It is this "montage power" that brings the audience's emotion and reason into the creative process and experiences the same creative path that the author experienced when creating images.

Eisenstein's view is inseparable from the enthusiasm for montage in the early Soviet Union. Kuleshov believes that the material of a film is a shot, and the performance of actors and the arrangement of scenes are only the preparation of the material. He did a famous experiment in which three different clips were pasted on a close-up of an actor without any expression. The first is a pot of soup, the second is the coffin of a female corpse, and the third is a girl with a toy. It is said that the audience thought that the first clip showed a close-up expression indicating that they wanted to drink soup, the second showed deep sadness, and the third showed a happy smile. This obviously exaggerates the role of montage and obliterates the role of performing arts. Even pudovkin said at that time: "A shot is just a word, a concept of space, and it is the object of death. Only when it is put together with other objects can it give life to the film. " Eisenstein even compared montage to hieroglyphics, saying that montage is like a word "dog" plus a word "mouth" in hieroglyphics, which is called "barking", which means that dogs bark, and two nouns are combined to produce a verb.

Eisenstein put forward the so-called "juggling montage" when he was engaged in drama activities. After his failure on the stage, he thought that movies were the place to realize "juggling montage". The so-called "juggling montage" is to capture the audience with powerful shots, episodes or programs that leave the plot structure, so that they can accept the ideas that the author wants to instill. The main content of the theory of montage prohibition put forward by Bazin is that montage should be banned if two or more action elements exist at the same time. He believes that montage is far from the essence of film and should be denied.

After World War II, Bazin, a French film critic, had a great influence on the world. His theoretical basis is based on "the photographic nature of movies". He believes that all art is based on people's participation, but photography has the privilege of not letting people get involved. The essence of film comes from the essence of photography, and its artistic appeal comes from the same source: revealing the truth. German kracauer also said that "film is essentially an extension of photography", and they thought that the task of film was to record the objective world.

Bazin said, "Only this cold-eyed lens can restore the true colors of the world" and "remove the mental rust cast by our feelings on objects". He believes that the first duty of a film director is to respect the materials and events he describes, not to express his views on them. "Realism" requires us to put aside the meaning we give to the world in order to restore the original intention of the world. He deduced another basic point of his theory: montage should be banned. Because montage narration implies the danger of imposing opinions on the audience, movies often force the audience to accept some ideology, which is opposed by the nature of movies. He spoke highly of the documentary film director Flahadi, taking the Eskimo hunting seals in Nanuk in the north as an example to illustrate the superiority of continuous shooting without montage. He believes that Flahadi discovered the world through movies, rather than creating a new world with pictures taken from reality, in order to express his views.

Bazin's main argument against montage is that montagists don't admit that single shot and unedited film clips are art, and Bazin thinks that single shot contains rich significance and artistic value. He accused Eisenstein of "hiding the event and replacing it with another synthetic reality or event" and "adding something" to the described object. Montage controls the fuzziness of the film and leads to singularity. The director becomes a guide to guide the audience, and the audience can only accept his point of view but can't understand the meaning of the film by themselves. Bazin thinks that reality is a multi-level structure, while Eisenstein cuts the meaning of nature into his own personal explanation. He especially opposes "juggling montage" and intellectual montage such as metaphor and symbol, and thinks that this is to impose ideas on the audience, while directors who respect reality should "disappear" in front of reality. Montage is literary and anti-film. What the film wants to express is the real time flow, the real depth, and the space-time continuity of photography and montage are incompatible. Bazin proposed replacing montage with depth-of-field lens. Because the depth-of-field lens has a sense of depth, different people and events between them can be presented to the audience in the same lens, and the audience can "appreciate" themselves. Of course, this also includes the use of actor scheduling and lens scheduling, that is, using the shift of actor position and the movement of lens to keep following the characters. The shot taken in this way must have a long length, so Bazin's theory was once called "long lens theory". In fact, the more accurate name should be "Continue shooting". The depth of field is to maintain the integrity of plot space, and the long shot is to maintain the integrity of plot time, that is, to achieve the "real-time flow and real depth" required by Bazin, without being destroyed by the segmentation of montage. Bazin believes that montage is about events, while continuous shooting is about recording events, which reserves the audience's right to freely choose and explain stages or events.

Bazin's theory has caused great changes in film creation around the world, and also promoted the development of film aesthetics that has been stagnant for a long time. However, the film industry generally believes that Bazin completely denies montage and advocates continuous shooting with depth of field lens, which is one-sided.

First of all, it is right for montage to regard a single shot as meaningless, but it cannot be regarded as complete in sense or require all shots to shoot continuously. The so-called long shot essentially cancels the difference between "shot" and "series shot", requiring each shot to be a "series shot" with the same and complete sentence, or even a self-contained scene. Any film must have a large number of shots with incomplete meaning, and it must be connected with other shots to have a clear or complete meaning. Sometimes it may be just for the convenience of narration, sometimes it is for the dramatic effect, and more often it is to let the audience see the meaning that can't be seen when the lens exists alone, such as the above-mentioned cross montage and metaphor montage. This is a way to let the audience realize the rich inner activities or the profound ideological connotation of the plot that the characters can't see through the visible concrete images. Therefore, the lens is both closed and open, closed by the action content, but open because of the connection and opposition with other lenses. The shots are independent and interdependent, and even a series of shots can not be separated from the overall content and form of the film and become a complete artistic existence.

Secondly, don't give up the convenience of film space and film time, the unique function of concentration and generalization, and the vast world of sound and picture montage because you prefer depth-of-field lens and continuous shooting. We should fully understand and attach importance to the role of depth-of-field lens and continuous shooting, and at the same time, we should also see its limitations. The depth of field lens can't get rid of the frame of the picture, unlike the eyes that are not affected by the frame and the interference of perspective problems. People's levels are different, and the scales of near and far things are different, so it is necessary to cooperate with the scene scheduling mirror, so "photography nature" still depends on human intervention. In fact, long shots only use scene and shot scheduling instead of montage combination to realize the replacement of picture range and content. So some people call this technique "in-camera montage" or "depth montage".

In addition, continuous shooting can only be used in one scene, and it is impossible to adopt the continuous shooting method for all events in different places and at different times. Hitchcock tried to shoot the whole film shot by shot in the rope, completely canceling the montage, but the effect was not satisfactory.

Reality doesn't depend on montage or continuous shooting. Montage can be used to cover up false things, but it is not necessarily untrue. On the other hand, continuous shooting's depth-of-field lens can't guarantee a realistic work.

The biggest reason for Bazin's opposition to montage is that he thinks that the director has become a guide to direct the audience, which cancels the ambiguity of the film. However, montage that meets the audience's psychological requirements and the requirements of line-of-sight shift is necessary for film narration. Artistic permission also needs the guidance of artists. Literary works, as ideological forms, are the products reflected by people's lives in artists' minds. Realism is not a photographic representation of life, but a reflection of life according to the artist's world outlook. The director's use of montage is not to add anything to reality as Bazin accused, but to reveal what exists in reality according to his own feelings. There is no purely objective record. The "reality" captured by the so-called "cold-eyed" camera is still inevitably chosen according to the director's point of view. In the combination of film and television shots, a series of shots are organically combined to form a logically coherent, rhythmic and relatively complete video clip.

Montage Sentences —— Progressive, Backward, Cyclic, Interpolation and Equivalence Sentences

Progressive sentence patterns. Combine shots in the order of panorama, middle shot, close shot and close shot.

Backward sentence patterns. Combine shots in the order of close-up, close-up, middle-view and panorama.

Circle sentence patterns. This sentence pattern is a combination of forward sentence pattern and backward sentence pattern.

Intersperse sentence patterns. The scene change of sentence patterns is not gradual, but alternating from far to near (or using montage alternately).

Equivalent sentence patterns. In other words, the scene remains the same. According to the natural paragraphs of the content of film and television works.

According to the transformation of time

Segmenting according to the shift of position.

According to the rhythm of the movie.

Therefore, the division of paragraphs is determined by the development of plot and the need of content or the intermittence and transformation of rhythm. Montage photo processing technology is a new photo processing method, which is different from the traditional adjustment of exposure and pigment distribution. Montage is an organic combination of mosaics.

This technology needs hundreds of scales, which are pixels. The selected scale should be allocated with various pigments, so that there is no empty block when the software is combined. The finished photo contains thousands of small photos, and there is a small world in the world, which can be described as "strange".