Montage from Les Vacances de Claudine (1957), dir. Charles Violette...NOT! |
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| Montage is the art of combining shots and sounds to excite feelings that may be visible nowhere in the original material. You put in a rose and an orange and out flies a flamingo. | |||
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"When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand," novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler wrote in 1950 about detective story plots. |  |
| Mystery that temple bells once signified in haikus is what doors now signify in movies. When a character pushes open a door, in big or small ways, the character changes. | ||
| The door opening in Dracula (1931), the door through which Tom enters in The Public Enemy (1931), the "iron curtain" of Stage Fright (1950) similarly transform everything. Passing through the door to his father, the Jazz Singer does the same. Liliom at the door to the underworld, a solider returning home in J'accuse (1919), and Alex ending Notorious (1946) do likewise. | ||
| But no dictionary could ever exhaust the overtones of any opening. A drug store door takes you to wherever. As a young sculptor remarks in Ivan Turgenev's novel, On The Eve. "No matter how often you knock at Nature's door, she won't answer in words you can understand." |
Read it. Learn it. Do it. |
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“A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.” John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” The Tiger’s Eye, March 1949 |
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You Do It Now: Kar-wai Wong created Hua Yang De Nian Hua (2000), a 2:28 montage out of shots of women appearing in nitrate prints of “lost” Chinese movies. In this exercise, you do something similar. The film clips for this chapter’s exercise show someone passing through a doorway. From all or some of these clips build a montage. Join them so that action beginning in the first clip concludes in the last, even though the actor changes. Synchronize the cutting to a sound track. In montage, the dancer is the dance. Step-by-step instructions and the files you can use are here. |