Where did the montage technique come from? brief introduction

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 inexpressible 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 connected the following scenes: (1) A young man came 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.