What does montage mean?

Broadly speaking, montage refers to "editing". Because "montage" comes from the French word "montage", which means "assembly and installation". Then how did it form?

When the film first appeared, the film reproduction technology was not developed. At that time, Lumiere brothers' movies were movies from startup to shutdown. So in order to express the story clearly, it is basically to tell the story with only one scene: panorama (showing the whole body of the characters). In order to express the emotions of the characters clearly, the movies at that time had to add exaggerated body movements for everyone to understand.

It was Edison's assistant Edwin Porter, an electrician, who really used different scenes for editing and shooting in history. He made a six-minute experimental film The Life of American Firefighters. He tried to piece together two pictures from different spaces to complete the narrative.

Porter's experiment came to an amazing conclusion: when two shots are spliced together, a contextual relationship can be generated in the audience's mind! You can combine those lens groups that are shot at intervals in completely different places into a narrative whole.

This gave birth to the most basic editing: smoothly combining different shots into the same continuous time and space.

But this kind of smooth lens will be a bit boring for the audience to watch for a long time, which will lead to the audience's inability to concentrate on watching the movie.

What's going on here? This answer was not revealed until applied psychology gradually matured-visual psychology.

The research of American psychologist Hope and Swiss scientist wiesel (who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for 198 1) shows that human brain and eyes have special cells to detect movement. These cells make people not stay in one place all the time when observing external things, but constantly shift their eyes and observe the world from different angles.

For example, when you are reading a novel, your eyes always move from one line to another. When the novel is in a gentle lyric paragraph, the reader's mood appears calm and peaceful, and the eye movement speed will be slow and leisurely. With the advancement of the novel plot and the excitement of readers' emotions, the speed of eye movement is also accelerating. This is consistent with the situation that people come to participate in activities in person. When a person is observing or participating in very exciting and rapidly changing activities, his reaction rhythm will be greatly accelerated, and he will quickly change the direction of his sight. This physiological phenomenon produces the rhythm requirement of montage.

Without these theories, some people have realized this. He's Griffith. But he is a completely unconscious, theoretical system, intuitive practice montage.

That is, our most commonly used "narrative montage" (later summarized by everyone).

Its characteristic is to explain the plot and show the events as the main theme, and to cut and combine the shots, scenes and paragraphs according to the time flow and causal relationship of the plot development, so as to guide the audience to understand the plot.