Why is montage used in filming

Soviet cinema insisted on shaping the cinematic medium to meet the message it was intent on conveying. Thus, while it may come across to American viewers as heavy-handed propaganda, Soviet cinema attacks the notion of a smooth cinema that makes the audience passive; and as a result, Soviet cinema brought many new devices to the still new cinematic language.

Not all montage has to be like the Soviet style, however. Montage can be used as a device for establishing spatial and temporal relationships within a movie. In fact, most action and suspense movies rely on the power of montage to create excitement.

A famous director who uses montage to create suspense is Alfred Hitchcock. The concept of montage has its parallels in other art mediums; an example of this is collage. While collage is in fact a technique for making art, much of its power resides in its theoretical implications, such as the importance of juxtaposition to the collage technique: things are combined that normally would not be.

This technique is often used to take elements of and create art of them, Furthermore, this juxtaposition of multiple seemingly different things challenges the unity of conventional art forms and thus challenges the grand narrative of art. When thinking about the collage, it can be helpful to learn about artists who use this technique.

One specific artist that is renowned for his experimentation with the collage is Pablo Picasso. Picasso viewed art as a re-presentation of nature rather than an imitation. Eisenstein argued that montages appeal to modern viewers because they are used to going about the world in this way. Each image stands on its own like a vignette , but they all work together to tell a general story.

Herman Melville also uses a montage-like technique in Moby Dick. The novel surrounds a long sea voyage ostensibly in pursuit of a mysterious white whale. However, for the vast majority of the book the whale is nowhere in sight, and Melville describes various events that take place on board the ship. These little moments, in many ways, stand on their own, giving the novel a montage-like feel, especially in its middle sections.

Filmmakers use this technique because training, by its nature, is dull and repetitive. Viewers would quickly be put to sleep if you showed them all the hours and hours of sit ups that Rocky Balboa had to do before his fight with Apollo Creed; so instead, they used a musical montage. Anyone who has seen The Karate Kid will recognize these lines. They form the chorus of a song sung over the final montage in that film, one of the most famous of all musical montages.

In this montage, we see the main characters fighting their way through a karate tournament to reach the final showdown.

Obviously the filmmakers could not show all the fights in full detail, so they opted for a montage to compress the time. Collage is a similar technique to montage, in that it also involves bringing together several separate elements.

However, collage is generally used in visual art rather than film or literature. In addition, the elements of a collage are usually taken from elsewhere, whereas the elements of a montage are original; that is, a film collage might use old newsreels or scenes from other movies, but all the shots in a montage would be created specifically for that movie.

A vignette is a short image, story, or description that stands on its own or in a group of similar vignettes. Each of the images or shots in a montage could be described as a vignette. It is not in every montage, but it's something to keep in mind. You can directly affect the way people feel by showing us one image, and then showing us a different one.

Therefore, a dialectical montage refers to cutting together of unrelated images to generate an idea or emotion in the viewer. For instance, we could cut from a man smiling to a coffin, to show he's happy someone is dead. Maybe my favorite video ever shows Alfred Hitchcock explaining Dialectical Montage.

We see him dissecting how cutting back and form from him smiling or leering at different images changes our interpretations of them. The definition of rhythmic montage editing is that every cut between each shot controls the pace at which the film or TV show accelerates. So this kind of editing can slow things down or speed them up at will. In most cases, the length of a shot is tweaked to form a pattern. We're either delivering staccato edits or elongating clips in slow motion to influence the audience's emotions about the scene.

One of the best directors using rhythmic montages is Edgar Wright. He often edits on the beat and uses songs to help build tension and even release comedy from those moments as well.

I love watching movies like Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead , where we see this kind of editing shine. A metric montage refers to meters of music, because it is the use of a visual pace directly correlated to the musical score accompanied by it.

I think this really brings the song to the forefront and shows someone getting ready with his rival to take on the biggest fight of his career. An o vertonal montage is the combination of different types of techniques. So you'll see metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage elements all packed together in one.

They do this to maximize the effect the montage has on the audience. Maybe the best modern montage I can remember came in Parasite. It uses all the techniques and ideas we have previously covered to tell the story of a family conning someone over a few months. It's enthralling, captivating, and really sets the tone for the rest of the film. We have a whole article about writing montages in screenplays, but I wanted to cover it briefly here.

There are a few different ways to write a montage in your script. First, let's look at a popular example on the page. There are many famous movie montages, so I went with the one my group thread suggested to me first. Holy crap, is this an amazing montage. Basically, its purpose is to show a power shift within the mafia. Told via a voiceover and including a sick Clapton track, we understand that burying the evidence means burying some stiffs. Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi.