medium specificity definition soviet montage

But we know that a better option was available: merely stop the film, set up all the new backdrops and stage placements and start the film up again. Méliès could accomplish this change of scene over the course of the 10-minute short film the way they do in theater: just keep the camera (like the audience in a theater) rolling while the curtains close and a new set is put up. Taking the set change aspect of theater, Méliès and his team created superb set pieces. What inevitably came from this fascination with image and plot was the need to form-hence “formative”-his own setting, and allow that setting to evolve with the story. In his films, the most significant being Voyage dan la Lune, or A Trip to the Moon, Méliès created his own images, based off his own mental pre-constructions and artistic ambitions. Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, or “Georges,” was the ultimate pioneer of the formative approach to film, and unbeknownst to him, the first instigator of montage theory (insofar as I am concerned). But, film as an art form needed a formative approach-as opposed to a realistic one-to really get it going. In these films, careful attention was given to camera placement and techniques that would enhance the viewing experience-including early attempts at 3D. These movies were what the French called actualités, or “actuality films,” the primitive documentary. This tendency, as highlighted by Seigfried Kracauer in his book Film Theory, was primarily “realistic.” The foremost example of this realism remains, to this day, the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (though many others were also made, even several that preceded this one). As the artistic potential of the medium began to be realized, particularly in France, constructionist tendencies developed to provide ideal scenes, in other words, people started to create film to reproduce a specific instance or make a certain, artistic image come to life. The Instigators: Méliès, Griffith, and LangĮarly use of the camera was purely documentary: Eadweard Muybridge’s horse, or Roundhay Garden Scene from le Prince, are solid examples of this. This will be accomplished by explaining the history of montage and its use simultaneously with the study of various directors who have influenced it. The point of this chapter is to explain the origins and manifestations of montage in popular film and help the casual film-goer obtain greater analytic appreciation for good cinema. In its most simple definition, montage is editing. That is the essence of montage: a synergistic phenomenon of cinema resulting in the splicing and alternating of filmed image that produces not only a plot element, but a contributory “language of film” that brings emotion and pace to the film as a whole. But properly splicing the images from the various images in a calculated and proper way will provide a different an often better film product. In reality, the synergistic product is not one necessarily better, but rather completely different: “something besides the parts.” To document an elk hunt from a single camera or from multiple cameras is, in essence, provision of an elk hunt.

At least, that is how we have often come to understand the phrase, and that is how the phrase has become perpetuated in our society-an explanation of emergence and synergy.

One of the most significant works on the history of philosophy is Aristotle’s Metaphysica, wherein he states that “… the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts …” in other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Medium specificity definition soviet montage