Mark Moran

Prof. Larry Engel

Film 3001: Midterm – Question 1

March 30, 1999

 

Montage

 

Vertov’s The Man With A Movie Camera is an early documentary designed to show how films are made and work, especially in regards to the Soviet principle of montage.  Like a Marxist dialectic, the Soviets developed the idea of a dialectical montage: a constant collision of one shot (the thesis) with another shot (the antithesis) to create a totally new meaning (the synthesis).  For example, a shot of a neutral expression that cuts to a shot of food makes the viewer perceive hunger, whereas the same neutral expression cutting to a shot of a funeral makes the viewer perceive sadness (Pudovkin 11-12).  In this way, the viewer subconsciously generates and enhances the meaning himself.  This new meaning is then collided with more new shots over and over again to continually expand and create new meaning.  Eisenstein said this “montage of attraction, units of impression combined into one whole, could be used to introduce a new level of tension into the aesthetic experience which would produce [unprecedented levels] of emotional saturation” (Cook 143).  The best examples of montage, such as Potemkin, have many quick cuts and very little sound or intertitles (none in the case of The Man With A Movie Camera) (Engel).

            In The Man With A Movie Camera, we are bombarded with rapid imagery and movement.  We see a man throwing a javelin and then cut to a man catching a soccer ball, but the screen direction and sense of what is off-screen are designed in such a way that it feels like the soccer goalie is diving to catch the javelin.  We see soccer balls kicked impossibly high, and cut them with shots of basketball players shooting the same balls through the hoop.  There are upside-down shots mixed in with very low-angle shots, and motorcycle riders on a circular track cut with a merry-go-round moving in the opposite direction.  We then see the point-of-view of someone on the merry-go-round, in which everything he sees is also moving the opposite direction.  These opposing screen directions create tension through their jarring quality, even though the content is not jarring.  On the other hand, the image of the soccer goalie diving to catch a spear is not at all jarring because the screen direction is smooth and consistent.

            Eisenstein compared montage in film to the building up of complex words from simpler words in hieroglyphic languages such as Japanese.  “The combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is regarded not as their sum total but as their product … the combination of two ‘representable’ objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented” (Eisenstein 16).  For example, a hieroglyph for a dog next to a hieroglyph for a mouth evokes the meaning “barking,” not the simpler “a dog’s mouth” (Engel).  Eisenstein might thus argue that the clip of the goalie catching the spear represents something more substantial than either the javelin or the goalie, such as a sense of danger or self-sacrifice.  However, The Man With A Movie Camera is probably more of a precursor to Eisenstein’s montage than a true example of it.  Vertov was more concerned with experimental kino-eye special effects and self-reflexive relationships than with creating new meaning through juxtaposition.

For example, since we see the soccer goalie catch a ball rather than a spear, we forget the image of the javelin and thus lose the grander meaning or tension that we imagined while he was still diving for a spear.  This is more consistent with Pudovkin’s view of montage, which is a collection of building blocks that sum together and intensify each individual element (Pudovkin 13).  The javelin thrower shot and the goalie shot are both more exciting when shown together because they become a potential cause and effect rather than just two isolated sports moments.  According to Henderson, the clips in The Man With A Movie Camera are better examples of collage than montage.  “The difference between montage and collage is a complex question… Montage fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly organized, synthetic emotional and intellectual patterns.  Collage does not do this; it collects or sticks its fragments together in a way that does not entirely overcome their fragmentation.  It seeks to recover its fragments as fragments; … to bring out the internal relations of its pieces” (Henderson 61).  Thus, while The Man With A Movie Camera certainly has the rapid-editing and shocking juxtaposition that characterize Soviet montage, there are important differences between it and Eisenstein’s montage films.

Works Cited

 

Cook, David A.  A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. 

New York: W.W. Norton & Co.  1996

 

Eisenstein, Sergei.  “Beyond The Shot.”  Film Theory and Criticism,

Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  15-24.

 

Engel, Larry.  Notes from class lectures.  Columbia University, Spring 1999.

 

Henderson, Brian.  “Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style.”  Film Theory and

Criticism, Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 57-67.

 

Pudovkin, Vsevolod.  “On Editing.”  Film Theory and Criticism, Fifth Edition. 

Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  9-14