Oh, my God, this is a montage!

Montage, the transliteration of French montage, was originally an architectural term with the meaning of combination and collection. Borrowing film and television theory means editing, combining and connecting. Montage in movies refers to the cutting and combination of shots, or editing.

Eisenstein, a famous montage master, Soviet film theorist and director, once mentioned in his works that "mouth" and "dog" in Chinese characters constitute "barking". "Mouth" and "dog" are nouns with independent meanings. However, when they are combined, they change qualitatively and become verbs. They are displayed on the screen, and the close-ups of "mouth" and "dog" are cut together, which naturally makes the audience realize that this is a barking dog, or that there is a dog barking there, just like hearing its voice. This is a montage. This montage technique has become a unique language form of movies.

The famous "Kuleshov experiment"

To give a typical famous example of montage, three shots are the same. Different editing methods will produce different effects:

1, a person is laughing.

2, the pistol is pointing.

3. A frightened face.

This sequence of shots makes the audience timid and afraid of the characters.

1, frightened face.

2, the pistol is pointing.

3. A person is laughing.

This combination of shots shows the bravery of the characters.

Eisenstein once summed up this experiment. He said: "Putting two unrelated problems together through editing does not mean adding one shot to another, but a creation, not a combination of parts. Because the result of this juxtaposition is qualitatively different from looking at each component alone. "

▲ Understand the montage in one minute.

When conceiving film and television works, the following six montage techniques are often used:

Cyclic montage: also known as repeated montage, repeated montage. Let some important objects and scenes appear repeatedly in film and television literature scripts, on the one hand, play an important role and attract readers' attention and attention; On the other hand, it plays a role in combing the context and dividing the levels in the structure of the works. For example, the teaching aid globe used by varvara Vasilyevna in the Soviet Union's "Rural Female Teacher" and the three pine trees on the mountain where she teaches are all recurring objects and scenes.

Contrast montage: Also called contrast montage. The lenses assembled by this technology are logically related, set off and compared with each other. This montage can be used not only between the scenes of ordinary shots and the expressions of characters, but also to combine long shots.

▲ "Godfather" stills

Parallel montage: connect related events and scenes that happen in different places at the same time, so that they can be presented to the audience in an orderly manner, so that the plot can develop in parallel and the suspense mentality of the audience can be strengthened. Griffith successfully used this combination method in Let's Oppose Disagreements: an innocent worker was wrongly sentenced to death, and when the noose was put around his neck, his wife arrived with the governor's pardon. This is the famous "last-minute rescue". In the movie Flying Tigers, Liu Hong's flying horse rescued Fang Lin's sister-in-law, which is also an example of using montage.

▲ Stills of "Opposing Differences within the Party"

Metaphorical montage: also known as figurative montage and symbolic montage, it requires that there is a subtle analogy between the connected shots and the scene, and through "similarity point", "metaphor point" and "implication point", it highlights the relevant characteristics between things and urges the audience to understand their inner deep meaning. Editing can create new relationships, for example, splicing a farmer's Cossack sword with a helpless animal slaughtered in a slaughterhouse will have a metaphorical effect.

▲ "Angels Love Beauty"

Juggling montage: this is a kind of comprehensive montage, which has both picture decomposition and picture concentration; There are panoramic views and close-ups; Fast-paced, nervous. Eisenstein successfully used the montage of vaudeville in his masterpiece "Battleship potemkin" and the world-famous passage "Odessa Steps", highlighting the bloody atrocities of the czar's military police in slaughtering peaceful residents, including the old, weak, women and children.

▲ "Battleship potemkin", Eisenstein

There are also common time compression montages. For example, the election montage includes a speech, a baby kiss, a revolving newspaper headline, another speech, a flipped calendar and more speeches, which add up to an election. Many TV programs begin with a montage clip reviewing the last program, so that the audience watching this program for the first time can understand what happened before.

▲ "A Generation of Masters"

Movies become an art because of montage, and because of the similarity between arts, many artists also use montage in their artistic creation. If you type "montage art" in Google, collage will first appear in the search results. The montage in the movie is transplanted to the plane, and there is montage.

Self-portrait of john hart Fayed, the first collage artist.

▲ "space splicing" in architecture-montage

▲ montage photo

In literature, comments on "montage thinking" can often be found in the analysis of China's classical poems by modern scholars. For example, in the last two sentences of "With Zhu Shu", the horizontal branches are covered, and the day is still faint. The thin strips set each other off, and sometimes the sun shines. Now, from our perspective, this is a montage technique: from day to dusk, it jumps naturally, like a faded shot in a montage movie.

I may sigh when I hear this: Oh, my God, this is a montage.