Reader Question: What is the difference between montage and series of shots?
Phil asked:
Best way to write a group of shots, MONTAGE or SERIES OF SHOTS, and is there a difference?
Does it make a difference how you write these shots if there is to be a VO in them? Say the Protagonist is describing the events as they are happening.
Dredging deep into my brain cells, I recalled something about montage from the “Cinema as an Art Form” class I took as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, recalling it has Russian roots. A quick check of Wikipedia supports that memory. First an excerpt from Soviet montage theory:
Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for “build, organize”). Although Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s disagreed about how exactly to view montage, Sergei Eisenstein marked a note of accord in “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” when he noted that montage is “the nerve of cinema”, and that “to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema”.
While several Soviet filmmakers, such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin put forth explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, Eisenstein’s view that “montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent thoughts” wherein “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other” has become most widely accepted.
Then this excerpt from the montage (filmmaking) entry in Wikipedia:
Montage is a technique in film editing in which a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information. It is usually used to suggest the passage of time, rather than to create symbolic meaning as it does in Soviet montage theory.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, montage sequences often combined numerous short shots with special optical effects (fades, dissolves, split screens, double and triple exposures) dance and music. They were usually assembled by someone other than the director or the editor of the movie.
Film historian and critic Arthur Knight connects the development of the Hollywood montage to aspects of Eisenstein’s editing:
“The word montage came to identify . . . specifically the rapid, shock cutting that Eisenstein employed in his films. Its use survives to this day in the specially created ‘montage sequences’ inserted into Hollywood films to suggest, in a blur of double exposures, the rise to fame of an opera singer or, in brief model shots, the destruction of an airplane, a city or a planet.”
— The Liveliest Art, Arthur Knight