What is a montage?

Montage (French: montage) is a transliteration of foreign words, originally an architectural term, meaning combination and assembly. Commonly used in three artistic fields, it can be interpreted as an intentional manual collage and editing technique in time and space. It first extended to film art, and later it was widely used in derivative fields such as visual art, including interior design and artistic coatings.

After World War II, andre bazan (19 18- 1958), a French film theorist, opposed the role of montage, believing that montage imposed the director's point of view on the audience and limited the fuzziness of the film, and advocated the use of depth-of-field lens and scene scheduling for continuous shooting, believing that only in this way could the integrity of plot space and the authenticity of time flow be maintained.

However, the role of montage is undeniable. Film artists always use montages and long shots to create films.

Some people think that a long shot actually changes the scope and content of the shot by the action of the shot and the scheduling of the actors, which is called "internal montage". Montage can be divided into performance montage and narrative montage, and can be subdivided into psychological montage, lyric montage, parallel montage, cross montage, repeated montage, contrast montage, metaphor montage and so on.

Montage in a broad sense refers to editing. In the previous movies, one reel was unedited, and it took more than ten minutes to shoot before changing to another reel. The first movie to use editing was the battleship potemkin, in which the stroller fell down the stairs, people were filming around, and mother was very nervous. The interactive editing of these pictures has produced a tense, compact and metaphorical effect, which has become an unprecedented classic of invention and creation in film history.

If you don't know much about it, you can refer to pudovkin's Mother or Eisenstein's Battleship of potemkin's Footsteps of Odyssey, but basically montage is a way for the director to manipulate the camera, that is, to control the absolute intellectual thinking and express the meaning, and the audience just waits to be instilled, which is completely different from the fuzziness and openness presented by the poetically expressed films such as Tarkovsky, Wenders and Ferini.

In fact, it shouldn't just be called editing, because there are other forms that can create a montage effect. In short, it is the word "knowledge" in China's writing. People and things in different places can be sorted in order by editing, so that you feel that they are related. For example, first a person is knocking at the door, and then someone comes in. In fact, it may have been taken in different places inside and outside the house.