Film Language – Cohen
Montage – the art of combining pieces of film / shots into a larger language
Montage – the art of combining pieces of film / shots into a larger language
- Griffith (Birth of a Nation)
- Eisenstein
o montage is collision of conflict between shot & its successor emotional content
illumination
rhythm
objects
direction of movement distances - Bazin
o agreed with Eisenstein that montage & dialogue are incompatible o believed that synchronized speech was a necessary development o film should reveal reality as whole (mise-en-scéne)
o anticipated depth of field shot (Orsen Welles) - Henderson
o long tracking shot (goddard)
• Metz
o structuralism / semiotics
syntagm: is necessarily made up of a sequence of signs which are meaningful because they are different
o film is not a reality but a language • Dayan
o theorizes shot/reverse shot sequence • Rothman
o film, not the sequence, makes the statement • Silverman
o suture can be made even more irresistible when the field of the speaking subject is implied
• Brown
o critiques POV, saying that shots refer jointly to the action of the
implied narrator and the spectator Film Form – Eisenstein
Cinema is Montage
- example of Japanese calligraphy / hieroglyphics
o dog & mouth = bark - the shot is the basic cell of montage
- collision of ideas
- dialectical approach: thesis + antithesis = synthesis
- logical vs. alogical
- emotional dynamism
- goal of synthesis of art & science