Task Four – Montage

There word montage has three different versions. There is the French term, Hollywood term and the soviet term. The French meaning means basically the assembly of clips and identifies the basic form of editing. Moving on to the Hollywood meaning a sequence of clips and a piece of narrative compressed to shorter length. Finally the last meaning Soviet  is a method of juxtaposing clips to define meaning that didn't exist when each shot was alone. 

The two key film makers of the montage era was, Les Kuleshev, and Serge Eisenstein.

Lev Kuleshev, was amongst one of the very first people to theorise about the cinema in the 1920s, Kuleshev argued that editing was like the construction of a building, (shot-by-shot) brick-by-brick, the shots created the film the bricks helped to erect the building. He did an experiment to prove his point. Through the video below we can see that he took a head shot of a famous Russian actor and intercut it with images. The reason in which why he did this was to allow the audience to make meaning of what they were seeing. The fact that he juxtaposed his shot created relationship within the clip.

Lev Kuleshev's Experiment.

Serge Eisenstein was considered the "Father of Montage", as well as this he was a student of Kuleshev. Eisenstein thought there of being two different ideas of montage. By contrasting shots Eisenstein tried to provoke associations that where induced by shots. As you can see from the clip below which was produced by Eisenstein show us the unrelated shots of the workers are being compared to the slaughter of the cow. This type of montage is a soviet montage.

Eisenstein's Strike Montage

From the clip below we can see that the rocky montage shows his whole training session therefore cut down in to a shorter amount of time meaning that is comes under the holly wood section of montage.

Rocky Hollywood Montage



Our First montage we produced was our holly wood montage. The intention behind this montage was to show the audience a variety of free kicks footballers may preform with or may do to train in order to get ready for a game. the montage makes meaning due to the fact that we start of with the bad free kicks first and gradually preform better ones as the clip gets on. I think this montage is successful in some ways due to its build up of amazing free kicks at the end and the syncing of the best free kick with the music, I think this montage could have been even better if we produced a wider variety of free kicks as the one that we have in it are very similar and therefore makes it seem boring.

Holly Wood Montage

Moving on to our soviet montage. our intention behind this montage was to induce actions to a face. The montage makes meaning due to the face that is shown in between clips in relation to the silly activities that is produced for example throwing the shoe at the wall then there being the face after. This allows the audience to think what the face maybe like there personality due to there actions. I think this was also a successful montage due to the fact that it relates to kuleshevs experiment as it is in a similar way.