Montage (film)
In film, montage refers to
- The editing together of different takes
- Any such film, comprising two or more takes
Eistenstein
Montage refers Sergei Eisenstein's idea that adjacent shots should relate to each other in such a way that A and B combine to produce another meaning, C, which is not actually recorded on the film.
The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch is bookended by two gun battles, one near the beginning of the film and one near its end. The gun battles are virtuosic demonstrations of the possibilities of film storytelling.
Lou Lombardo worked with director Sam Peckinpah both to design the camerawork for The Wild Bunch and to edit the film.
As many as six cameras were filming simultaneously from different locations; the cameras were operating at various film rates from 24 to 120 frames per second.
He and Peckinpah then edited the massive length of film footage for six months in Mexico, where the film had been shot.
In his 2011 assessment, Daniel Eagan wrote, "The Wild Bunch had 3,642 edits, more than five times the Hollywood average for a feature. ... Montage this dense hadn't been attempted since Sergei Eisenstein back in the 1920s."
Stephen Prince writes, "The editing is audacious and visionary, as the montages bend space and elongate time in a manner whose scope and ferocity was unprecedented in American cinema."
In his biography of Peckinpah, Daniel Weddle wrote of the effect: "the action would constantly be shifting from slow to fast to slower still to fast again, giving time within the sequences a strange elastic quality".
Gabrielle Murray summarized how The Wild Bunch affected filmmaking:
"Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Louis Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Lombardo_(filmmaker)#Montage_in_The_Wild_Bunch
See also
- André Bazin - film theorist who disliked montage, preferring long takes
- Design
- Film
- Mise-en-scène
- Sergei Eisenstein
External links
- Cinematic techniques @ Wikipedia
