What is a montage? Is there a specific definition?

Montage is a transliteration of French montage, which was originally an architectural term, meaning assembly and installation. Film and television theorists extend it to the field of film and television art, which refers to the editing and combination in the process of film and television works creation. The meaning of "montage" is wide or narrow. In a narrow sense, montage refers to the arrangement and combination of lens pictures, sounds and colors, that is, in post-production, according to the overall idea of literary scripts and directors, the recorded materials are carefully arranged to form a complete film and television work. One of the most basic meanings is the combination of pictures. Bela Balazs, a film aesthetician, said: Montage is that the film artist connects many shots in a pre-conceived order, and as a result, these pictures produce a certain expected effect through the order itself. It can be seen that montage and lens picture are not the same elements, but the rules of assembling these elements, which is a rhetorical device in the symbol system of film and television language. In a broad sense, montage not only refers to the combination of lens images, but also refers to a unique artistic way of thinking of artists from the beginning of film and television drama to the completion of works. In this sense, pudovkin's famous assertion that "montage is the foundation of film art" still applies today, and it will probably apply forever.

As the existence of skills and thinking, montage has a deep-rooted foundation of human psychology.

The visual psychology of montage is based on that human beings live in a moving world. Objects pass through our field of vision, leaving a series of images on the retina, which requires changes in the field of vision to move normally. When a person's eyes are fixed on a fixed object (such as a point on the wall) for about five minutes, the image will become blurred. Look at something else, return to the original image, and it will be clear again. This experiment shows that the human eye has the physiological instinct of constantly pursuing new images.

Bruiser pointed out that people have this instinct in infancy, for example, babies have been chasing moving objects with their eyes before they can gather their eyes. The latest research by 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 image motion. These cells make people have a physiological need when observing external things: they don't stay in one place all the time, but constantly shift their eyes and observe the world from different angles. Film and television use sound and pictures to record images, reproduce actions, and the use of montage correctly reproduces the way we constantly pursue new goals when watching things, and reproduces the inner process of contacting videos in turn with the shift of attention in the real environment.

This psychological process exists not only in film and television art, but also in other art fields. When you read a novel, your eyes always move from word to word and from line to line. With the advancement of the novel plot and the excitement of readers' emotions, the speed of eye movement is also accelerating. When the novel is in a gentle lyric paragraph, the reader's mood appears calm and peaceful, and the movement speed will be slow and leisurely. This is consistent with people approaching an event. When a person is observing or experiencing a very exciting and rapidly changing activity, his reaction rhythm will be greatly accelerated, and the direction of sight will be quickly changed. On the contrary, he will be very calm, indifferent to an ordinary thing, and his observation of objects will become dull. This physiological phenomenon produces the rhythm requirement of montage.

To sum up, the impression gained by a quiet observer can be reproduced by a so-called "slow-cut" film technology, that is, each shot stays on the screen for a long time before being replaced. The impression gained by an extremely excited observer can be reproduced by "quick cut", that is, a series of interconnected short shots. It is through montage that film and television artists realize this psychological process of human beings.

Therefore, in a sense, the talent of film and television artists lies in the use of montage, so that the visual psychological rhythm of human beings can be properly reproduced in the film. In a quiet and peaceful scene, using fast cutting will cause jumping and abrupt effects, which will make the audience uncomfortable. On the other hand, if the content of the scene is wonderful, the audience will instinctively ask for quick editing, and if the editing is slow, it will destroy the wonderful content of the film. So, how is the "speed" of screen switching appropriate? It is appropriate to decide by the emotional content of the scene, but the emotional content of the scene is included in the script. Therefore, the mosaic patterns appearing in the final movie are the same as those clearly defined in the script. This pattern in the script is gradually formed during the playwright's writing process. Even before he started, in the process of collecting materials, he had picked up the materials with montage eyes and decomposed and combined time and space. It is in this sense that montage is a unique way of artistic thinking, which runs through the whole process of film and television creation and is the foundation of film and television art.

From combination skills to montage of thinking mode, it has experienced a historical process from occurrence to development to maturity.

Strictly speaking, the early films had no montage editing and no decomposition and reorganization of time and space.

Lumiere's movies are actually just a demonstration of new technology and a simple game. It uses a very simple method to shoot a movie, that is, aim the camera at a scene until it is finished. This is a naturalistic record lacking montage conception.

Mei began to connect the shots taken in different scenes to tell stories, which made the film have the characteristics of "decomposition and combination". Obviously, he is one step ahead of Lumiere. But the whole scene was shot from a camera, and the lens connection is also the simplest connection. He doesn't understand the significance of this connection combination.

At the same time, American directors Burt and Griffith are also looking for a unique way to build this film. In 1902, Porter uses some movie materials reflecting the life of firefighters in the old movie library to make up the picture of saving the mother and the child in the studio by the way of actor's acting, and then splicing the material film and the supplementary film appropriately to form the life of an American firefighter. Porter's attempt is a big step forward than that of Mei, exploring the possibility of freedom of time and space for the film.

On the basis of Potter, Griffith became the first person to consciously use "montage" in the history of movies. In The Adventures of Dawley (1908), Griffith created the technique of "flashback"; In the bleak villa (1909), he applied parallel montage for the first time and created the famous "last-minute rescue" technique. In Ramona (19 10), he created a great vision; In Pastor Longerda (19 1 1), he used very close shots and developed the skill of alternately cutting people. In the Holocaust (19 12), he first used mobile phone photography.

Although Griffith has created these series of works and skillfully used his new techniques in his two representative works, The Birth of a Country (19 15) and Conflicts with Different Groups (19 16), he never tidied up his montage methods. It seems that he works mainly by intuition and an indescribable love for film means, and he never shows that he is aware of these principles. He believes that montage is only the most powerful assistant to vividly express drama stories, and using montage is only a technical means. In essence, he has not understood the basic nature of montage and its full potential.

After the First World War, Soviet filmmakers developed montage into a complete film theory system on the basis of analyzing the creative experience of Griffith and others, according to the requirements of the new Soviet regime for film art, and on the basis of a series of experiments, thus forming the Soviet montage school represented by Kuleshov, pudovkin and Eisenstein. Griffith mainly focuses on how to deal with the relationship between two drama scenes, while Soviet directors pay more attention to the relationship between single shot and fragment, and the meaning and implication expressed by this relationship.

According to Kuleshov and pudovkin, the essence of film lies in the composition of the film, and in the interrelation between the shot clips to organize a series of impressions-how to change from one shot to another, and how to form them in chronological order. They are convinced that montage editing can create extraordinary effects and realize the narrative and ideographic nature of the film. To this end, they have done a lot of experiments to practice their theory. According to pudovkin's records, in 1920, Kuleshov once connected the following scenes:

(1) A young man is coming from left to right.

(2) A young woman came from right to left.

They met and shook hands. The young man lit it with his finger.

(4) Large white buildings with wide steps.

(5) Two people walk up the steps.

In the eyes of the audience, this connected segment becomes an uninterrupted action: two young people meet on the road, and the man invites the woman to a nearby house. In fact, each clip was shot in a different place. The scene showing the young man was shot near the state-run department store, the scene of the woman was shot near the Nikolai Gogol Monument, and the scene of shaking hands was shot near the Grand Theatre. The white building was cut from an American movie (the White House), and the scene of walking up the steps was taken in the Church of the Savior. As a result, although these clips were shot in different places, they were regarded as a whole by the audience, thus creating what Kuleshov called "creative geography" on the screen. Here, people's illusion is used to combine fragments of different time and space into a whole, and montague's function of decomposition and combination is fully reflected. The Soviet school not only stayed in the narrative aspect of montage, but also further studied its ideographic function.

Pudovkin believes that every object photographed from a certain shooting point and then displayed to the audience on the screen is still a "dead" object, even if it was moving in front of the camera. Only when this object is put together with other objects, and only when it is displayed as a part of various visual image combinations, this object is given life. Eisenstein highly summarized this ideographic function of montage. He said: the juxtaposition of two shots is not a simple one plus one, but a new creation. In his view, the unedited footage taken by the camera is meaningless and has no aesthetic value. Only by combining them according to the montage principle can we convey the visual image with social significance and artistic value to the audience.

The famous "Curry Schouw Effect" is the strong evidence of Eisenstein's montage theory. Pudovkin once described this experiment as follows: "We selected several special shots of the famous Soviet actor Mo Youxin from a certain film, all of which were close-ups, and we were not lazy at all. We associate these same close-ups with small clips of other movies in three combinations. In the first combination, Moyuxin's close-up is followed by a dish of soup on the table, which clearly shows that Moyuxin is looking at the dish of soup. The second combination is to closely connect the lens of Mo Youxin with the lens of the female corpse lying in the coffin. The third combination is this close-up, followed by a little girl playing with an interesting teddy bear. When we show these three different combinations to some audience who don't know the secret, the effect is amazing. The audience enjoyed the artist's performance very much. They pointed out that when he looked at the soup he left on the table, he showed a thoughtful mood; They were very excited because he looked at the heavy and sad face of the female corpse; They also appreciate his relaxed and happy smile when watching girls play ball. But we know that in all three combinations, the faces in the close-ups are exactly the same. "

Eisenstein once emphasized that no matter which two shots are matched together, new appearances, new concepts and new images will inevitably be produced. Through the conflict of lens alignment, it produces new meanings and guides the audience's rational thinking. This is the essence of Eisenstein's "juggling montage" and "intellectual montage". Montage appeals to both narrative emotion and appeal to reason. Therefore, in Battleship potemkin, Eisenstein cut into three scenes of "the lion swoops down, looks up and leaps up" which have nothing to do with the plot, thus showing the people's awakening and resistance. In October, this tendency to express abstract ideas became more obvious. The collapse of the iron statue of the tsar symbolizes the collapse of the tsar's regime, and inserting the statue of Napoleon is a metaphor for kerensky's dictatorship.

Eisenstein tried to communicate image thinking and logical thinking through montage, and to combine science and art, trying to embody human rational activities and strengthen the philosophical tendency of movies. This book is very valuable. However, Eisenstein overemphasized the role of montage, thinking that movies should use montage to explain reality, avoid characterization, express ideas directly, and even intentionally put Das Kapital on the screen. As a result, some of his films are fragmented and obscure. Nevertheless, Eisenstein and other representatives of the Soviet school made indelible contributions to the film montage theory. In 1950s and 1960s, long shots were widely used, especially TV reporting technology, which contributed to this trend. The depth arrangement of complex scenes in feature films is developing day by day. This kind of scene scheduling does not need to change the action location, which changes the nature of traditional montage. Film theorists believe that the evolution of this montage marks a new era in film history. Although in the 1950s and 1960s, some western film newspapers and periodicals sometimes predicted "the demise of montage" and "the end of montage", practice has proved that there is no film without montage, and even in a long shot, there is a montage (scene scheduling) inside the shot. Montage also exists in TV, even if it is a live event for TV viewers, such as ship launching, sports competition or delegation arrival. , must be edited on the spot. This kind of live editing requires TV photographers and directors to have special qualities, be able to immediately discover and accurately express the essence of events, and have more keen montage thinking and montage vision.