Task 5 - Understanding montage theory

3 Key Meanings:

French montage - In French films this term simply identifies the process of editing a montage means "editing" in French.

Hollywood montage - This type of montage is used to condense a long narrative sequence into short compact sequence. An example of this is in Rocky they show clips of him preparing for the fight and getting in shape, the different places that he was training in and the time of day changing.
A hollywood film maker may choose to include a montage because it shows the different aspects of the movie and what he is doing and it shows the best bits in a short period.

Soviet montage - In a soviet montage it shows two different videos which relate to each other. This type of montage is is used to reveal a hidden, deeper meaning within the video.Soviet filming was a method of juxtaposing shots so that they can develop a new meaning which did not first exist in either of the shots alone.

Lev Kulshaov was one of the first people to theorize the standard cinemas in the 1920s. He also agreed that editing a film was like building a film with just bricks making the film established. Kuleshov had done an experiment to prove this point too, he went and took an old film clip which only had a headshot of a Russian actor and then he inter-cut the shot with other images. Once Kuleshov presented his film to the audience they honoured and admired the acting and the display of hunger in their face when he saw the soup, the grief of when looking at a dead child and the delight towards the woman.

Acting of juxtaposing shots within a sequence made the relationship and the audience were then able to conclude the meaning from the two different shots. This was an experiment which started the technique which is known as montage.

Sergi Eistein was a student of Kuleshovs but not for long but the two went their seperate ways because they didn't have the same idea of montage. Eisenstein then tried to irritate associations in the viewers which was a shock.