Montage in Early Cinema

Montage and I have come to a temporary standstill, an exemplary demonstration of the difference between the kino-eye and the the human eye—and it’s (the kino-eye’s) unsurprising (according to Vertov) capacity to go on ‘seeing’ indefinitely.  

So, I would like to take the opportunity and talk about, a montage collision (of sorts), between two ingenious men of the American cinema, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

Note: Keaton comes before Chaplin due to the hierarchy imposed upon us by the alphabet and is not meant to designate preferences of one over the other, just letting you know ;)

As a Cinema and Media Studies Major I have found myself falling in love with a lot international films and cinemas, and have insofar “avoided” immersing myself in the work of many great American filmmakers.  However, having been given the opportunity to revisit the works of both Keaton and Chaplin in our class, I have found myself returning to the highly charged question, which I first heard brought up, in a most elegant way, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film The Dreamers—when the dispute goes…

…Keaton or Chaplin?

The text from which the Theo (the Frenchman) reads is from a book by Andrew Sarris, called The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968:

“The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is the difference between poise and poetry, between the aristocrat and the tramp, between man as machine and man as angel, between the girl as a convention and the girl as an ideal, between the centripetal and the centrifugal tendencies of slapstick.” (Sarris, 62).  

I think what Sarris and The Dreamers both try to establish is the innate dichotomy of Keaton and Chaplin, whose appropriation of the ancient commedia dell’arte has crystallized them both in the history of cinema.

I want to return to, what Sarris claims at the end of his paragraph to be the tendencies of slapstick.  Namely, that Charlie’s slapstick comedy is geared inwardly while Keaton’s is more of what one would call an outwardly propelling force—which is actually exactly the way that I see both of them.

Keaton’s slapstick derives from his motion to try and avoid the strike of disaster.  The Keaton character tends to be much more cognizant than Chaplin’s Charlie, who is blind to the symptoms of the ‘storm’.  As Bazin writes in his essay Charlie Chaplin, “Charlie carries to absurd lengths his basic principle of never going beyond the actual moment.” (Bazin, 148).  Charlie is only capable of living in the moment, and that is exactly the locus from which his gag’s are born. 

Take for example Keaton’s The General (at 00:33) in comparison with Chaplin’s Modern Times (1:12).  With Keaton, the comedy is all about the appropriation of the environment.  As Keaton chases after the rogue Northern soldiers, he is physically impeded by the chunks of lumber on the tracks and through an amazing choreography of acrobatics Keaton is able to dispel disaster.  While in Modern Times, Chaplin’s humor is all about self-appropriation.  It is as if Charlie has a hidden reset button, which he presses after an action is complete, an act which of course repeatedly gets him in trouble but is also the source of his slapstick.

These styles of appropriation of both Keaton and Chaplin are reflected even in the most minute muscles of their bodies.  Charlie jitters and kicks neurotically and his face is a canvas of constantly twitching muscles; his smile, his walk, the scrunching of his nose.  Keaton on the other hand is tacit, his face held in a state of characteristic motionlessness; his back straight or hunched, his eyes the only true indicators of any great emotional reaction.  

In a sense, Keaton and Chaplin, together, are a complete equation. They are two halves of the same whole.  So, Keaton and Chaplin, Chaplin and Keaton—why choose?

Sources:

Bazin, Andre. “Charlie Chaplin.” What is Cinema?

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. 62.

In an attempt to develop my final paper I want to take the time to return to Soviet montage, specifically in the film Earth 1930, directed by Alexander Dovzhenko.

Promotional Film Poster:

As a Soviet filmmaker, Dovzhenko’s manner of approaching the cinematic medium is fundamentally different from that of many of his contemporaries, namely Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.  

How?  Let the opening sequence(s) speak for themselves. (Start at 00:58)

We see an open field, split in almost perfect symmetry between the earth and the sky.  A fluid gust of wind combs through the lush fields of grain, dancing across the screen in a manner that is graceful, fluid and harmonious.  Within the first two minutes of the film, through the use of montage, Dovzhenko shows us a breathtaking and idyllic landscape—envisioning a rural utopia that would characterize a great deal of the Socialist Realism to come:

“Earth is Dovzhenko’s ultimate paean to nature, the land and those who toil on it and whose lives are inextricably bound up with it. The film is literally teeming with grandiose images of the natural world: such as the opening shots of a vast sky and rolling fields, of sunflowers and apples. The farmers collective relationship to this world and its order is immediately established through the juxtaposition of an old man dying (the end of life, of a cycle) and young children (the beginning); the fact that they are eating the apples that lie strewn on the grass further crystallizes the sense of a constant, natural cycle of birth, growth and death (as does the justly famous shot of a woman and a sunflower, in which the composition makes them almost graphically contiguous across the frame).

(Bingham, Poetry in Motion).  

As Bingham attests, Earth characterizes itself as a humanistic endeavor.  With films like Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin human trauma seems to serve a more allegorical purpose.  The death of sailor Vakulinchuk is the catalyst that fuels the peoples uprising and in many ways the death of the ‘good son’, Vasily, inEarth serves a similar purpose.  However, Eisenstein’s films are about the masses, ones he manipulates with ingenuity, but ones that are maintained as the massesin order to preserve the intellectual, and not the sensational, poignancy of the film.  Dovzhenko uses Vasily’s death to empower the people, but he does not detach us from feeling emotionally connected to his characters.  We are drawn to them and we grieve with them in a manner which is  completely different from the ire we feel for Vakulinchuk’s death in The Battleship Potemkin.  As film theorist and critic Adam Bingham asserts in his article Poetry in Motion, “[Dovzhenko] drew extensively on both indigenous folklore and his own life, his work appeals more to the heart, and his montage (in contradistinction to Eisenstein) to the senses, than to the mind.”

The same seems to be true when comparing Dovzhenko to Vertov.  In Man with a Movie Camera the synthesis of man and machine is mechanized, whereas, even in its most mechanical sequences (2:10), Earth retains a deep emotional connection with its audience.  The montage of this sequence focuses on the combined efforts of the kolhoz and the new machinery.  It is only through their combined efforts that the collective can produce such a bounty of bread, and it is this combined effort in sustaining humanity that in a sense humanizes the machine as well.  Although, perhaps in this sense highly propagandistic, Earth ’aesthetisizes’ the collective farm in a very artistic and conceptual way, utilizing montage to appeal to the senses; a montage of the heart and soul and not necessarily of the mind. 

Sources:

Alexander Bingham.  Poetry in Motion: Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth. Sense of Cinema, Issue 31. Found here.

To be perfectly honest, I do not think that Alexander Medvedkin’s folkloric farce Happiness (1935) is the most apt example of a film with contrapuntal montage.  However, I still found it to be incredibly fascinating and brilliant.  However, there is a particular sequence whose montage editing struck me. 

From beginning to end, the film is incredibly animated, filled with an array of caricatures and this scene is no different.  The scene occurs at the climax of the story, when the house on walking legs is ambushed by the Kholhoz, who, after having cornered the thieves proceed to viciously pelt the retched, anti-collectivists with watermelons (2:48-4:00). First, Medvedkin establishes a clear hierarchy through his cuts.  We see Anna and the collective, full bodied, from above, while the villainous thieves are shot from under foot, there bodies reduced to mere pieces, heads and feet flailing from underneath the grain houses’ foundation.  

At 3:22 of that sequence Medvedkin takes the focus away from the thriving heroine, Anna, and brings our attention to an old man sitting atop the bountiful harvest, pelting enormous melons at the  Baba Yaga-like character hiding beneath the house.  

This montage sequence actually reminded me a great deal of a similarly edited sequence from Fernando Leger’s Ballet Mechanique where we see a rather hefty woman with a sac, ascending a staircase (00:45).  As we see her moving up the staircase Leger creates a series of jump-cuts that send her back down the stairs to repeat her trek.  Leger repeats this scene monotonously, a stab at the audience that perhaps is there to induce a sense of desperate frustration—a Dada inspired quick cut montage meant to anger the viewer with its absurd repetition.  

This is not to say that Medvedkin uses the scene to the same effect.  The sequence does not appear to be made up of jump cuts, per say, but the rhythm and meter of the cutting does make it appear to be so.  As the scene continuously replays, the old man heedlessly lops watermelons at the witch underneath the grain house, brandishing these enormous fruits almost out of thin air.  The entire act should in reality be a disgraceful display of waste on the part of the collective, who has worked so hard to reap such a plentiful harvest.  However, they seems to rejoice in the occasion, breaking watermelons left and right.  In this sense, the jump-cut like editing of the scene makes the collective appear impossibly plentiful.  

Like the endless, Sisyphean ascent of the woman in Ballet Mechanique the smashing of the watermelons in Happiness appears tireless.  The collectivist’s actions are a testament to their endless success, they are so (excuse the pun(s)) fruitful that their solution for getting rid of the anti-Kholhozian is to “spread” their good harvest. 

Medvedkin’s film may be about Khymer, the simple soul, but there is nothing simple about the films construction, and though a typically Eisensteinian montage is missing from the film, Happiness’s whimsical, playful and sometimes trick filled editing (/montage) seems to brandish just as much force and energy.

Still from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera:

{ Little tidbit before we get to the meat of the blog: On youtube I found another version of the film with the musical accompaniment that I am used to hearing, if you are interested do take a look.}

Even on the umpteenth screening, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera never seems to lose its intrinsically visceral quality. Every time I watch the film I feel like I am seeing it with a new set of eyes, still my own, but somehow different from the ones that saw it the time before and the time before that.  In the film and in film theory the image of the eye has always been incredibly potent, especially when we consider what it may represent.

In Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s first surrealist collaboration, Un chien andalou (1928) the eye plays a fundamental role.  The film begins with an inter-title that reads ‘Once upon a time…’ and then cuts to an shot of the director himself (Luis Buñuel), sharpening a straight razor.  Through a series of montage cuts the first sequence comes to a startling end when Buñuel’s razor slices through a woman’s eye.  This iconic image of the eye is representative of the spectator’s gaze, which Buñuel himself violently attacks within the first few minutes of his film.

In Man with a Movie Camera the eye suffers a similar fate, and Vertov in both his films and his theory is very clear about making the distinction between the kino-eye (the camera eye) and the eye of the audience:

“The kino-eye lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different from that of the human eye.  The position of our bodies while observing or our perception of a certain number of features of a visual phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera, which, since it is perfected, perceives more and better.” (Vertov, 15)

According to Vertov, the kino-eye is and must be the way through which we view film.  The cinema cannot be viewed through the spectator’s gaze because the spectator’s gaze is too imperfect, it lacks the power of manipulation that the kino-eye poses; the ability to capture and reconstruct reality.

The kino-eye is the fascination with the apparatus, which is why in many of the film’s sequences the filmmaker and his apparatus become the subjects of the story. One scene in particular that visually emphasizes this conflict of the two “eyes” can be found here, at 3:48-4:20.  

This montage sequence is actually quite difficult to adequately described in words, but it is at the most basic a synthesis of the human eye and the kino-eye, where the imperfections of the woman’s eyes are perfected by the eye (lens) of the camera.  We see the woman washing her face, then we have a P.O.V. shot from the woman’s perspective and suddenly the kino-eye takes over, and focuses the shot for us, trumping the human gaze and its imperfections.  The eye mimics the camera and the camera mimics the eye, creating a beautiful synthesis of the two, a kind of human-machine hybrid—the true kino-eye.

Within this short montage sequence one of my favorite moments is when the woman begins to rapidly blink her eyes and the shades she is looking at mimic her blinking.  To me this sequence is indicative of so much in terms of montage.  The blinking of the human eye is what, in a sense, gives film its continuity, because a film which is made up of different shots like this -.-.-.-.-.- will appear like this ————— to the human eye, precisely because we blink.  The flipping of the shades, which echo the blink, are synonymous with the women’s eyes.  The gaps between the shades are intervals, opened and sealed rapidly—a visual representation of exactly what montage accomplishes, which is the meaning found in the interval between two images.

 Now that is something to blink think about.    

Sources Cited:

Vertov, Dziga.  ”We: Variant Manifesto”.  Kino-eye; The Writings of Dziga Vertov.

When told to think montage, one’s brain does tend to jump, almost at a default, to the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein (a scene from October), with its rapid cut overtonal and intellectual montages.  

(Disclaimer:  …At least my brain does.  So for the sake of the sentence, let us pretend that when we think of the cinematic art of montage our minds jump to the soviet cinema of the twenties and thirties.  You’ll pretend for me, won’t you ;)? )

In fact, according to Eisenstein, in Griffith, Dickens and the Film Today when one thinks montage, one should not think German Expressionist cinema, which was a “barbaric carnival […] [a] destruction of the healthy human infancy of our art.” 

[I would like to retract the above statement as I was not aware that Metropolis, and Fritz Lang himself, do not necessarily fall directly into the category of German Expressionist Cinema].

Nevertheless, I must put my Eisensteinian devotion aside, because in all honesty I was enamored with Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis.  

Having done my fair share of cyber snooping after watching the film, I found its history to be incredible fascinating.  It has recently been restored to what film theorists believe closely resembles the original film, with about 28 minutes worth of footage found in the Museo del cine archives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (This newly restored version is the one available on netflix instant play!)

Metropolis is an amazing example of montage, though perhaps not the kind Eisenstein had in mind for the cinema.  The film at its most fundamental is a story about montage.  As Fritz Lang reveals through the opening inter-titles of the film, the ‘head’ and the ‘hands’ of society have been fragmented.  There only chance of reunification lies with the ‘heart’.  Hence begins the tale of the urban dystopia where the crisis of capitalism has split society in two; what in my previous entry I may have called segment A + segment B.  In this sense, the metaphor of montage can actually be seen on the screen, with the fragmentation of space (the two cities) and time (or the attempt to manipulate/control it).  The city is irrevocably split in two, with the wealthy living above ground and the proletariat thrown into the depth of the underground.  They are segmented to create an ‘interval’, a physical space that is eventually brought together by the labors of the ‘heart’ (Freder).  Even more graphically poignant is the manner in which Fritz Lang characterizes the physicality of time and the people’s desire and frustration in trying to control it. When Freder first descends into the underground in search of Maria, one of his first encounters is with a worker whose toils include the shifting of a clock’s hands, a task which keeps the factory, and the city, running.  

However, the the task, like time itself, is endless and the task physically seems to destroy the worker.  The chivalrous and warm hearted Freder jumps in to take his place, hoping to switch identities with the worker until the next shift change, but time physically overwhelm him as well.

The colossal task of trying to retain control and keep up with time proves to be an inhumane, Sisyphean task.  Yet, derailing from the status quo (the timing of the clock) can only bring chaos, as becomes evident when the workers rebel at the end of the film.  Only once the space/time interval between the two worlds is crossed can the chaos come to an end. 

~~~~~~~

Similar to the films of D.W. Griffith, Lang utilizes cross-cutting to create a sense of anticipation, a pulse that carries from the screen straight into the belly of the audience.  For example, the scene in the underground city, where Maria and Freder are desperately trying to save the innocents from the flood, is remarkably reminiscent of the ice scene in Way Down East.  However, unlike the earlier melodramas, the flood is more than a rescue sequence.  An amazing ballet of movement, the underground water sequence is remarkable edited.  The assault on the audience’s pathos is constant but the visual is more than that.  As Lang cuts between the gushing waves of water and the crowds upon crowds of children, their hands reaching towards the sky, the two images begin to blur together.  The water and the children move as one, trying to escape the crumbling underground.  The two forces (the children and the water) unite to form an almost mystical force, an expressionist montage that is in many ways overtonal, combining the graphic imagery and the rhythm of the cutting to create a truly emotive ‘whole’.  

Another very interesting example of montage that came up in the film was Frtiz Lang’s use of superimpositions to create a moving ‘photomontage’ in a single shot.

  
[Screenshot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis via ScrnPrnt]

These shots that filled the screen reminded me greatly of the Dada photomontages, like the one below by Hannah Hoch, that over and over, emphasized the chaotic organization of society and the human mind.  A synthestia of our mind’s eye, in which space and time are anything but linear. 

A montage of the fantastic and emotive.    

Hannah Hoch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-Belly Culture, 1919.

Sources Cited:

Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Griffith, Dickens, and the Film Today’.  Film Form.

Screenshots of Freder w/ clocks found through Google Search, keywords: Lang Metropolis Clock.

Montage is…

and therein lies the problem.  

because when it comes to the concept of montage, the attempt to formulate one, concrete definition is incomprehensible.  Within the cinematic language montage is a flurry of tension|collision|conflict, organizing the film material to create|produce|destroy.  Though unruly and incongruent in its definition (as many will argue montage to be one thing while others will argue something else) montage is at its most basic, in accordance with the writings of Eisenstein, the operation of A + B = C.

Montage is in the mind. It is the brain child of perspective, both on behalf of the producer and the viewer. A displacement of space and time, montage is a conflict of images that is sewn together through perspective in order to create a new “whole”.  (as a definition it’s functional, so let’s start there)

As Bazin asserts in his article “The Myth of Total Cinema”, the technical aspects of cinema always seemed to lag behind the imaginations and ideas of its pioneers, and so the cinema started of as single-shot slices of life.  However, once filmmakers began to take scissors to film stock, the continuity of the single-shot film was disrupted by the cut; the first wispy breath of montage.  An interruption in the visual narrative that would, paradoxically, function as the mechanism for continuity.

-.-.-.-.-. a discontinuous line of images  
that somehow, in our minds eye,
could become a single unit ———

The development of this type of continuity editing owes a great deal to American film director D.W. Griffith.  Considered by many to be the forefather of montage, Griffith played a fundamental role in the cultivation of a specific type of montage, namely cross-cutting or parallel-editing.  This technique allowed Griffith to interweave multiple narratives and actions throughout space and time.  Many of Griffith’s later melodrama’s utilize the technique to heighten the excessive pathos of the film.  In the iconic scene on the ice in Way Down East, Griffith uses cross-cutting/parallel editing to create an immense sense of emotional tension and anticipation.  As David Bartlett races towards Lillian Gish’s prone body, the pace of the editing rapidly increases and the fragmentation of time and space facilitates a visceral reaction.  The pulsation of the film transfers to the audience, and our own pulse begins to roar, eventually turning into a sublime feeling of catharsis, as Lillian Gish’s character is finally rescued from an icy death.  

In Intolerance the use of cross-cutting and parallel editing is more complex, because the leaps that Griffith’s attempts to make in both space and time are enormous.  We are constantly being tossed from the throws of a Babylonian battle field, to the inflamed streets of France, to Jerusalem and finally back again to the ‘modern day’ woes of the Dear One.  However, the narrative continuity does not automatically flow from one story to the  next, and herein, according to Eisenstein, lies one of Griffith’s most intolerable faults as ‘the forefather’ of montage.  Instead of one congruous story line what we end up with is four fragmented story lines, tied ‘loosely’ together through the theme of religious and social intolerance and the iconic, non-diegetic image of a mother (Lillian Gish) rocking the cradle of life.

D.W. Griffith, Intolerance 1916.
[Still of Lillian Gish rocking the cradle of life.]

According to Eisenstein, what Intolerance lacks is the proper unification and creation of a whole:  

“…it turned out to be a combination of four different stories, rather than a fusion of four phenomenon in a single imagists generalization.  Griffith announced his film as a ‘drama of comparisons.’ That is what Intolerance remains—a drama of comparisons rather than a unified, powerful, generalized image.”  

For Eisenstein Griffith’s failure lies in his inability to transcend the metaphor of the representational image.  In Intolerance Griffith does not move towards what Eisenstein would call the ‘new image’, a ‘new image’ being a different kind of montage that in the eyes of Eisenstein overcomes mere emulation and representation—something that, Eisenstein would argue, is accomplished through Soviet montage.

For Griffith montage was a tool of imaginative storytelling, that at its most apparent created a narrative continuity on screen.  Montage was representational, it had no hidden meaning—it was, as Eisenstein puts quite bluntly, the most simple of metaphors.  There was no transcendence of the image past representation, no hidden or deeper meaning

…or at least, not yet.  

It would only be with the development of Soviet montage that Needle + Picasso could equal Apartheid.

Resources:

Andre Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema.”
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith & the Film Today.”
Lev Kuleshov, “The Principles of Montage.”