The many flavors of Montage

In talking with my Teaching Assistant for my introduction to film class at Duke University, Bart Keeton, it became clear to me that I do not completely understand the idea of montage. So I decided to explore the topic here and solicit feedback. Hopefully this is helpful for others too!

My primary source for my knowledge on montage is Sergei Eisenstein and his essay in the book Film Form. The quote I would like to start with and use as a working definition is "The combination of two 'representable' objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented." To me, this is a fairly broad statement that could encompass almost anything. For example, this encompasses eyeline matches that we have studied all semester. By this definition,the shot-reverse shot combination is an example of montage. In one shot, you have one person on one side of the frame. He or she is staring in an off-screen direction on the opposite side of the frame. From this shot, that is all you can gather-the character is staring in the off-screen direction. In the next shot, you see a character on the opposite side of the screen staring in the off-screen direction on the same side of the frame that the character in the previous shot occupied. This is montage: it is only through the combination of these two shots (some would argue you would need a third shot showing the character from shot one)that you can derive that dialogue is taking place. Is this not montage according to Eisenstein?

If we dive further into his work, we get other good quotes explaining montage, such as "The shot is by no means a montage element. The shot is a montage cell...What then characterizes montage and, consequently, its embryo, the shot? Collision. Conflict between to neighboring fragments." So I suppose that your definition of collision could be debatable-maybe the shot-reverse shot is not enough collision. But in my opinion, this collision of consecutive shots with two different characters on opposite sides of the frames staring straight ahead at the off-screen space is the montage that Eisenstein is referring to.

So instead of beating a dead horse, I decided to move on to Vsevolod Pudovkin's essay from the same book that also discusses editing. In the introduction to his piece, it says "Kuleshov and his cohort [D.W. Griffith] later theorized that emotional connection and narrative could be propelled through juxtaposition, believing that the real character development in a film took place in the cutting room rather than before the camera." This, too, is exactly what I'm arguing for my shot-reverse shot example. Pudovkin argues for the use of the close-up to give further meaning: "The close-up directs the attention of the spectator to that detail which is, at the moment, important to the course of the action." Most shot-reverse shot combinations employ close-ups to display emotion, so all signs are still pointing up. And then, finally, Pudovkin delivers the final piece to my puzzle: "In this sequence must be expressed a special logic that will be apparent only if each shot contain an impulse towards transference for the attention to the next. For example: (1) A man turns his head and looks; (2) What he looks at is shown." This is the essence of my shot-reverse shot example and how it gets its meaning, so at least I have identified the source behind my theory. Now I just need to find why what Eisenstein is arguing is different.

So I returned back to Eisenstein, and I started at the introduction since that is where I found Pudovkin's thesis. And there I found this: "Unlike Pudovkin's stress on the narrative and the emotional flow possible with montage, Eisenstein emphasizes its disjunctive and colliding effect." Now I'm really getting somewhere. Pudovkin is definitely focused on the narrative when he talks about a man looking in the off-screen direction and then the camera cutting to follow his gaze. I, too, am talking about the same kind of situation. Apparently, Eisenstein is not. The type of "collision" he is referring too must, then, be one independent of any type of narrative thread. I still think that the two individual shots of a shot-reverse shot should qualify as a collision, but I guess to be an Eisenstein collision (I just made a new film term), the sequence must be independent of the narrative.

With this as my new hypothesis, I reread Eisenstein and stumbled upon this quote: "But in my view montage is not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another." Alright, so maybe the shot-reverse shot qualifies as two shots stuck together. And then Eisenstein says this: "The vulgar notion of what happens-as a blending-has also led to the vulgar notion of montage mentioned above...Is that correct? In pictorial-phraseological terms, yes, But not in mechanical terms. For in fact each sequential element is arrayed, not next to the one it follows, but on top of it." This type of montage, the one Eisenstein is NOT describing, is, in fact, exactly what I am talking about. There IS a difference between the montages of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and I line up on the side of Pudovkin...I think :).

[Post scirpt: Writing all of this out helped me tremendously. I originally intended to focus exclusively on what Pudovkin and Bela Balasz had to say it about the close-up and apply it to the highly controversial Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, but I instead to decide to explore what I did NOT know. I'm glad I took the latter path and used this blog as an opportunity to learn, and I cannot wait to see what kind of feedback I receive.]