What is the concept and classification of montage in movies?

Montage means "splicing" in French, but it has developed into a theory of lens combination in movies and a unique artistic technique in Russia, which is the meaning of freestyle painting in paint and painting industries.

When different lenses are spliced together, they often have special meanings that each lens does not have when it exists alone. This writing is also called montage.

1. Parallel montage

This montage is often represented by two or more plot lines in different time and space (or at the same time and in different places), which are described separately and unified in a complete structure. Griffith and Hitchcock are masters who are very good at using this montage technique.

Parallel montage is widely used. First of all, because it is used to deal with the plot, it can cut down the process, save space, expand the information content of the film and strengthen the sense of rhythm of the film. Secondly, because this technique is a parallel expression of several clues, it is easy to produce a strong artistic infection effect.

For example, in the movie "Fighting against the North", the director used parallel montage to show the scene that I captured the Motianling with the enemy, which caused a tense rhythm.

Cross montage

Cross montage, also known as alternating montage, quickly and frequently clips two or more plot lines that occur in different regions at the same time. The development of one clue often affects other clues, and each clue is interdependent and eventually blends together.

This editing technique can easily cause suspense, create a tense and intense atmosphere, and strengthen the sharpness of contradictions and conflicts, which is a powerful means to grasp the audience's emotions. Thrillers, horror films and war films often use this method to create chase and thrilling scenes.

For example, in the Battle of the Northern Expedition, the third line of our army and the enemy marching towards Dasha River and the third line of guerrilla dam bombing were alternately spliced together, showing that thrilling battle.

Inverted montage

This is a montage that disrupts the structure, showing the current state of the story or event first, and then introducing the beginning and end of the story, showing the recombination of "past" and "present" in the concept of events. Often through overprint, underline, voice-over, narration and other means into flashback.

The use of inverted montage disrupts the order of events, but the relationship between time and space should be clearly explained, and the narrative should conform to the logical relationship. This is how the review and reasoning of events are constructed.

4. Continuous montage

This kind of montage does not develop many clues like parallel montage or cross montage, but follows a single plot clue and follows the logical order of events in rhythmic and continuous narration.

This narrative is natural and smooth, simple and smooth, but due to the lack of time-space and scene transformation, it is impossible to directly express the simultaneous plots, it is difficult to highlight the antagonistic relationship between plot lines, it is not conducive to generalization, and it is easy to feel procrastinating and straightforward. Therefore, it is rarely used alone in a film, but mixed with parallel and cross montage techniques to complement each other.

Extended data:

The main functions of montage are:

1, through the cutting and combination of shots, scenes and paragraphs, the material is selected and accepted, so that the performance content is clear and clear, and it is highly summarized and concentrated.

2. Guide the audience's attention and stimulate the audience's association. Although each shot only shows a certain content, a certain shot sequence can standardize and guide the audience's emotions and psychology and inspire the audience to think.

3. Create a unique film and television time and space. Every shot is a record of real time and space. After editing, the time and space are reconstructed to form a unique film and television time and space.

4. By means of montage, the narrative of the film has gained great freedom in the use of time and space. A skill can jump from Paris to new york in space or span decades in time.

Moreover, the juxtaposition and intersection of actions in two different spaces can cause nervous suspense, or show the relationship between people living in two places, such as the lovesickness of lovers in two places. Montage in different periods can repeatedly describe the relationship between the past psychological experience and the current inner activities of the characters.

This freedom of time and space transformation makes movies provide freedom for novelists to express their lives to a great extent. The use of montage enables film artists to greatly compress or extend the actual time in their lives, thus producing the so-called "movie time" without giving people the feeling of violating the actual time in their lives.

However, it should be noted that the grasp of montage should not be too long, otherwise it will be boring and not too short, which will make people feel hasty.

5. Montage, the ability to manipulate time and space, enables the film artist to extract the part that he thinks can best explain the essence of life, this character, the relationship between characters and even the artist's own feelings according to his analysis of life, combine them together, and keep the most important and enlightening part after decomposition and combination.

Griffith's performance in the film Conflict with Different Groups is that the innocent husband watches the pain of the convicted wife in court and only focuses on filming her convulsive hands. In Red women soldiers, Qionghua saw the landlord go south for eight days and shot in violation of reconnaissance discipline. The next scene is that the captain shoots Qionghua's gun on the table in order to avoid reporting to the company commander.

The action is interrupted, but the plot is continuous and the relationship between characters is developing. This decomposition and combination make the film highly concentrated and generalized, so that a film in less than two hours can introduce a person's life like Citizen Kane, involving decades of social changes.

6. Montage has two undeniable important functions. One is to let the film freely use narrative angles alternately, such as from the author's objective narrative to the subjective expression of the characters' hearts, or to see a certain state of affairs through the eyes of the characters. Without this alternation, the narrative of the film will be monotonous and clumsy. The second is to influence the audience's psychology by changing the rhythm of the action through the lens.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Montage Technique