Theories of Film Editing - Montage Mis-en-scene And beyond - Essay Example

Theories of Film Editing: Montage, Mis-en-scene, And beyond Abstract: Cinema started as a recording medium. The camera was just a machine that would record the objects in space in front of it. This recording medium which only later became the most popular and powerful a visual art, was used then to record the theatre performances. Then the camera was a static viewer and the recording was continuous demanding no editing. It was the movements of the camera like closing in to a subject or zooming out of it that demanded editing. Joining together these pieces of shots carrying different images is called film editing or montage. As film evolved itself into a creative art called Cinema editing became the most creative tool of the film maker. This tool got sharpened through theories like Montage theory, Mis-en-scene theory etc and their practices. Cinema is an art that developed from man’s incorrigible wish to record the movement and the moving objects, because it was the moving and not static objects that interested him. The first film show, the Lumier Show was just a shot of a train coming into the railway platform. Thus in the beginning Cinema was just only a recording medium and the movie camera only a recording machine. It functionally started as a medium to record theatre performances. The tragedy of the theatre is that every great performance by any actor goes into thin air just when the curtain is down. There is no record left. Cinema filled up this gap between the performance and the record for the posterity. As a recording machine the camera stayed static, taking the position of a static audience in the theatre watching a play. Thus the recorded footage demanded no editing as the whole recording process was continuous. PARALELL MONTAGE: It was the American film makers D .W Griffith (1875- 1948) Edwin Porter (1870-1941) who made the static camera vibrant .Griffith and Porter found that the camera could close in to an object. They invented what we call today the “close up”. A famous close up shot of Griffith is Mae Marsh’s clasped hands in the trial episode of Intolerance, one of Griffith’s classics. The close up here adds on to the emotional tone of the film’s narrative. According to Siegfried Kracauer, (1997 ) “ It almost looks as if her huge hands with convulsively moving fingers were inserted for the sole purpose of illustrating eloquently her anguish at the most crucial moment of the trail; as if, generally speaking the function of any such detail exhausted itself in intensifying our participation in the total situation.” (Theory of Film, PP47).Thus when the camera started changing image sizes, the continuity of the film recoding got broken. The shooting got cut into taking shots of different ranges or image sizes. These pieces of film, carrying different shots of different image sizes had to be joined together. Joining of these film pieces into a meaningful expressive structure is what film editing is and is called the “Montage”. Though Griffith is credited with the invention of ‘close up’, he is not considered as the inventor of the ‘Montage’ as such. But he is credited only with conceiving the most primitive mode of montage and it is called “Parallel Montage”. Joining shots of contrasting contents is the essence of parallel montage. Angela Dalle Vacche (2002) explains it thus: Griffith conceived of the composition of movement-images as an organization, an organism, a great organic unity. This was his discovery. The organism is firstly, unity in diversity that is a set of differentiated parts; there are men and women, rich and poor, town and country, north and south, interiors and exteriors, etc. These parts are taken in binary relationships which constitute a Parallel Alternate Montage, the image of one part succeeding another according to a rhythm. (The Visual Turn PP 56) Even today, the chase scenes of thrillers are based on the technique of parallel montage. Two entirely different actions taking place in two different spaces maybe often at two different times are joined together in juxtaposition so as to create an impression in the minds of the viewer that they are taking place at the same time. This creates tension on the screen which is felt by the audience watching the chase scenes of thriller films. Typical example from a Griffith film is the famous scene of the Klan’s rescue in yet another film classic, Birth of a Nation. Ronald Bogue (2007) explains the scene thus: “Griffith’s, celebrated use of concurrent or convergent montage as in the Klan’s rescue in Birth of a Nation is presented as an accelerated alternation between the approaching posse and the increasingly endangered innocents.” (Deleuze on Cinema, PP 49). THE THEORY OF MONTAGE: Griffith was not a film theoretician and hence couldn’t explain the process of limited montage he could achieve. It was the later film geniuses of the Soviet silent film era who defined Montage and formulated a grammar for cinema. As it happens always the language evolved first, the grammar got formulated later. It was the masters of Soviet cinema, like Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod Pudovkin who experimented with Montage and formulated a meaningful grammar for cinema. Of these Eisenstein (1898-1948) was the master theoretician. The core basis of Eisenstein’s theory of montage is the concept of Dialectics by Hegel. Hegelian concept can be summarized like this: a thesis confronting an anti-thesis leads to a synthesis. Eisenstien finds that this principle of dialectics can be applied to all creative processes including art. If one mixes two water colors of green and yellow, they mix themselves to get synthesized to a color which is neither green nor yellow, but still have both the green and the yellow in it. In Music, as Robert Browning pointed out in his famous poem “Abt Vogler”, the magic of creation of the musician is like this: “Out of three sounds he will frame not a fourth sound, but a star.” The poet mixes the words in such a way that they ring a new meaning, a new echo. Eisenstein found that the same process of generation of a new meaning occurs when two film pieces are placed in juxtaposition. Eisenstein (1947) explains the phenomenon thus: Two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition. This is not in the least a circumstance peculiar to the cinema, but is a phenomenon invariably met with in all cases where we have to deal with juxtaposition of two facts, two phenomena, two objects….. For example take a grave juxtaposed with a woman in mourning, weeping beside it, and scarcely anybody will fail to jump to the conclusion: a widow (The Film Sense, PP4) Eisenstein points out that quality and quantity are not two different properties of a phenomenon, but different aspects of the same phenomenon. This is a law in physics. But Eisenstein argues that it applies to other spheres of science and also to art. He quotes Professor Kurt Koffka (1935) who applied this law of physics in the field of behavior and found out that “The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, where as the whole –part relationship is meaningful.” (Principles of Gestalt Psychology, PP 176) That’s the difference between art and arithmetic. In arithmetic one plus one will give a sum called two. But in art one plus one, will be something else, some thing more than the sum. More than the mere sum it gives a new quality, a new meaning, a new concept. The woman, in the example given by Eisenstein, is a representation or rather a sign in the semiotic sense. The black robe of mourning that she wears is also a sign or a representation. These two signs can be represented objectively. But these two representations juxtaposed produce some thing more than the sum of the two representations---- the concept of the “widow”, a concept which cannot be represented objectively. It is a new meaning, a new idea, a new image arising out the juxtaposition of two objectively represented signs --- the grave and the woman in mourning dress. But these shots so juxtaposed should represent the theme of the film. “Piece A (derived from the elements of the theme being developed) and piece B (derived from the same source) in juxtaposition give birth to the image in which the thematic matter is most clearly embodied.” (The Film Sense PP11)The juxtaposition of these partial details represented by these two shots A and B , thus binds these details into a whole , that’s a generalized image, with in the mind of the film maker and which in turn is experienced by the spectator. This is the basic unit of the experience of cinema according to Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Walter Murch explains this phenomenon, with respect to the spectator, thus: The truth of the matter is that film is actually being cut 24 times a second. Each frame is a visual displacement from the previous one - it is just that in a continuous shot the displacement from frame to frame is small enough for the audience to see it as motion within a context, rather than as 24 different contexts a second. On the other hand, when the visual displacement is great enough (as at the moment of the cut) we are forced to re-evaluate the new image as a different context: miraculously, most of the time we have no problem in doing this. (In The Blink of an Eye PP 13) TYPES OF MONTAGE: The dominant element in the shots in juxtaposition is what decides the type or the method of montage. Eisenstein classifies montage into five types, which are Metric montage, Rhythmic montage, Tonal Montage, Over-tonal montage and Intellectual montage. Metric Montage: Here the dominant element that decides the construction of montage is the meter or absolute length of the shot. Length of the shot is equal to the duration of the shot. By joining together shots of different lengths or duration an effect equal to a measure of music can be created. In this type of montage the content with in the frame of the shot is subordinated to the absolute length or duration of the shot. Rhythmic Montage: It is the movement with in the frame that decides the montage movement from frame to frame in rhythmic montage. This movement with in the frame can be objects in motion, or the camera in motion, leading the spectator’s eye along the lines of some immobile object with in the frame. The best example for this type of editing technique is the Odessa sequence in Eisenstein’s film classic, Battleship Potemkin. Tonal Montage: This is a stage beyond the rhythmic montage. Here the emotional tone of the shot often expressed by the color tone is the dominant element that decides the montage movement from frame to frame. The tonality of the light or the graphic tonality with in the frame when juxtaposed gives emotional tonality to the montage structure. The ‘fog sequence’ before the Odessa sequence in Battleship Potemkin is quoted as the best example to demonstrate the tonal montage. Over-tonal Montage: Here the color tone with in the frame and its overtone together decide the movement of montage from frame to frame. The conflict between the principal tones of the frame and their over tones create this montage. It must be remembered that the color tone is the emotional tone of the frame. A dark frame emotionally expresses gloom, while a brightly colored frame expresses relaxed joy. Intellectual Montage: This is aesthetically the crudest method of montage .Here images representing clear ideas are juxtaposed to make an intellectual statement. In Potemkin, after the firing and massacre of the people by the army on the Odessa steps, Eisenstein juxtaposes three images of sculptured lions, in the sequence of sleeping, waking up and roaring. The intellectual statement made is that the people have wakened up as a revolutionary force. Woody Allen in his film Love and death, (1975), uses the same montage of lion shots in reverse to create a comic effect. MIS-EN-SCENE THEORY: It was Andre Bazin , ( 1918- 1958 ), the renowned French film theoretician , and spiritual father of the French New Wave film movement , who countered and almost demolished the montage theory of Eisenstein. According to Bazin, montage by trying to create an image of the reality through the juxtaposing of fragmented shots or pieces of recorded reality is actually fragmenting the reality in front of the camera. The film director through this method of editing is manipulating the reality. According to Bazin, montage theory and editing method refuses to take into account the “depth of field” in front of the camera, or the space in front of the camera. This space or the mis-en-scene, in a limited sense (Mis-en-scene is cinema’s grant undefined term, according to Brian Henderson (1976) --- Movies and Methods PP315), is where the image of the reality should evolve through the actors or the objects, without the active intervention o the film maker or the editor. This is the virgin and very pure image of the reality, which the spectator shall enjoy. Thus Bazin advocated for long takes, a single piece of unedited film which may or may not constitute an entire sequence. The image of reality would take shape naturally without any manipulation by the film maker or editor, in such long takes, Bazin argued. Citizen Kane by Orson Wells is Bazins favorite example. It is in this film that Orson Wells and his camera man Greg Toland contributed to the aesthetics of cinema by using wide angle lens, for dramatic purposes, there by creating what was known later as “deep focus” and the “depth of field”. To quote Bazin (1967): “Citizen Kane can never be too highly praised. Thanks to the depth of field, whole scenes are covered in one take, camera remaining motionless. The dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on montage were created out of the movements of the actors within the fixed framework.” (What is Cinema, Volume.1, PP 33) Another example which Bazin often quotes is the sequence of the protagonist, Nook hunting the seal, in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Here the whole hunting is picturised in a single long take without cuts, allowing the cinematic time merge with the real time. “Montage could suggest the time involved. Flaherty however confines himself to showing the actual waiting period; the length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, its true object.” (Ibid, PP27) Bazin’s theory of Mis-en-scene divided the film practitioners and theorists into two camps—montage camp and mis-en-scene camp. Followers of Bazin like Alfred Hitchcock started filming full sequences in a single takes, leading to the evolution of what is called “planned sequences”. It was the French film genius Jean- Luc Godard, himself a film critic who formulated a balanced view between the two. Montage does in time what Mis-en-scene does in space, argued Godard. JUMP CUT: It was Godard who introduced another editing technique called jump cut through his first film Breathless Jump cut as an unconventional editing technique is defined by Karl Reisz, and Gavin Millar: (1989) thus: “Cutting together two discontinuous parts of a continuous action without changing the set up. He cuts abruptly from one scene to another with little warning and no attempt at smoothness.” (Technique of Film Editing, PP 345). The abrupt jumps with in the shot condense the time, while the space remains the same. Editing is invisible in the mainstream Hollywood cinema. The more invisible the editing is, the more it serves the commercial purpose-- that is keeping the spectator immersed in the action, thus ensuring the presence of an unquestioning, undoubting witness. Godards jump cut leaves visual gaps for the spectator to fill up mentally. Here the viewer has to assume a more critical role while viewing the film. . Robert Philip Kolker (1983): “Breathless not only gives the feeling of cinematic techniques being invented, but allows the experience of viewing to be rediscovered.” (Altering Eye, pp177- 178) Though there were innovative editing practices earlier during the German expressionism (1919-1927) and the French impressionism (1918 -1929), they didn’t evolve into major film theories or influence film editing practices as much. Anyway it is through these theories and practices that the most creative tool of the film making, the film editing evolved and enriched the dream like art of cinema. To quote Walter Murch: “we accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams.” (In The Blink of an Eye PP56) ======================== Works Cited: 1) Bazin Andre, what is Cinema, Volume.1, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1967. 2) Bogue Ronald ,Deleuze on Cinema, (Deleuze and the arts 1) Routledge, 1 edition, March7, 2007 3) Eisenstein Sergei, The Film Sense, Harcourt Brace & Company,1947 4) Henderson Brian, The Long Take, Movies and Methods, Edited by Bill Nichols, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993 5) Koffka Kurt , Principles of Gestalt Psychology, Harcourt, Brace, 1935 6) Kolker Philip Robert, Altering Eye, Contemporary International Cinema, Oxford University Press, New York, 1983 7) Kracauer Siegfried, Theory of Film, Princeton University Press, November 1997 8) Murch Walter, In The Blink of an Eye: A perspective of Film Editing, Silman-James Press; 2 Revised edition August 1, 2001 9) Reisz Karl, and Millar Gavin, Technique of Film Editing, second Edition, Focal Press June 23, 1989 10) Vacche Dalle Angela, The Visual Turn (Rutgers Depth of Filed Series) Rutgers University Press, December 31, 2002 Read More