Montage Sequences

to produce a great deal of evidence to prove his point. To let the audience know that Calloway does in fact produce this detailed evidence, it would have been necessary to show the evidence in full: this would have meant introducing a long, dramatically fl at sequence just at a point when the story is reaching its climax. The diffi culty was solved by making a short montage sequence with shots of fi nger-prints, documents, Lime’s belongings, etc. In this way the audience was shown that Martins had in fact been convinced of his friend’s guilt, while the pace of the action was only momentarily slowed down.

This example shows the kind of use the montage sequence is commonly put to in contemporary fi lms and also points to its limitations. The sequence, like most montage sequences used to-day, is devoid of any emo-tional effect. It is necessary for the smooth development of the plot but is, in itself, emoemo-tionally neutral.

The actual details of editing montage sequences are generally left to the end of the production when it should be obvious exactly how much clarifi cation is needed. The script-writer will often simply say something like:

“ Dissolve to scene 75; Montage showing country-wide effect of General Strike. ” It is then the editor’s job to sketch in briefl y what the writer has asked for. To do this, he must fi rst decide on a small number of points he will wish to stress and then, using library shots or specially photographed material, assemble them into some sort of developing continuity. When editing his sequence, his main consideration must be to make it fast, while keeping each image on the screen just long enough to allow its content to come across. There must be a balance of subject-matter to ensure that the effect asked for — “ the countrywide effects of the General Strike, ” in this case — is convincingly rendered. An over-insistence on one aspect of the theme — say on the fact that undergraduates helped to drive buses — may produce undesirable inferences and divert the spectator’s attention from the main theme.

As for the mechanical details of editing montages, very little can profi tably be said. Having established the highlights of the sequence, the editor merely has to produce a reasonably pleasant looking continuity. He may amuse himself by trying to arrange pictorially pleasing dissolves, superimpositions or wipes. Provided the con-tinuity is clear, however, these small details of presentation become unimportant questions of personal taste.

Two things the editor must guard against. Firstly, a montage sequence operates, so to speak, on a different plane of reality from straight narrative. If it is to fulfi l its practical function of unobtrusively fi lling certain gaps in the story, then it must do so quickly. A montage sequence which becomes unduly long unnecessarily inter-feres with the conviction of the rest of the narrative and thus destroys the effect it was made for.

Secondly , the montage sequence must be conceived as a whole. A continuous, more or less self-contained passage of music is generally used to bind the whole series of images together and to underline the rhythm of the passage of events. A badly planned montage with bits of realistic dialogue alternating with superimposed general images can become a confusing affectation.

From what has been said so far, it should be obvious that the montage sequence employed for purely practi-cal reasons of clarifying the continuity should be used as sparingly as possible. The introduction of a quick impressionistic sequence in which the spectator is, as it were, asked to view the action from farther away, tends to interrupt the authenticity of the narrative because the spectator is suddenly made to view the story in an entirely different, less personal light.

The sudden switch from naturalistic narrative to montage was particularly common in war fi lms made in this country and in America. Frequently, a montage implying an advance of troops, a mass landing or the launch-ing of an offensive was introduced into a story deallaunch-ing with a particular set of characters; nearly always, there was a drop in dramatic tension as the story was taken from the personal to the general plane. A good instance is provided by Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan where the plot tells of a group of men engaged on a special mission; when the operation is over, a montage sequence follows, employing shots of explosions and fi ghting, superimposed over a map of the battlefi eld and implying that a similar story is taking place all over the island.

The sudden switch from the personal drama of the story to the journalistic montage does, no doubt, put the story into a larger context; it also brings with it a chilling anticlimax.

For this reason, the pure continuity-link type of montage sequence has been increasingly falling into disfa-vour. Wherever possible, directors have in recent years tried to avoid the standard montage images — falling leaves, calendars, train-wheels, all well-worn clich é s by now — and have tried to imply necessary transitions in more economical ways. The long unnecessary sequences of locomotives, wheels, rails, etc., used to convey a character from one place to another are usually quite superfl uous: a hint that the character is just about to move, a dissolve and an establishing shot or remark at the destination, is usually quite suffi cient. Similarly, a passage of time — so often conveyed by fl apping calendar-leaves — can often be conveyed quite simply through a trick of phrasing, a cut-away to another intermediate scene or by simply changing the season or clothes of the characters in adjacent episodes.

If the purely utilitarian montage sequence has been used too frequently, then the script-planned montage which makes a dramatic impact has, if anything, been used too little. There have been hints in a number of fi lms that the montage form can lead to remarkably interesting results when it is applied in an intelligent way.

There is a whole range of dramatically auspicious situations to which montage is peculiarly suited or which cannot be conveyed by straight narrative. Here is a rather unorthodox example.

CITIZEN KANE ¹

A posthumous biography of a newspaper millionaire, Charles Foster Kane ( Orson Welles ) . It begins with Kane’s death, after which the editor of a “ March of Time ” -like newsreel sends out all his reporters to interview Kane’s surviving friends. Thus we are taken from interview to interview, in each case the story told to the reporter being shown in fl ash-back. At the end of the fi lm we are able to piece together Kane’s whole life .

The extract quoted below is the fl ash-back of an interview with Jedediah Leyland ( Joseph Cotten ) , Kane’s oldest friend. He is telling the story of Kane’s fi rst marriage to Emily ( Ruth Warrick ) , a niece of the President of the U.S.A.

( Bernstein, who is referred to in the dialogue, is the editor of Kane’s newspaper “ The Enquirer ” and is decidedly not of Emily’s social standing. )

1 Director: Orson Welles. Editor: Robert Wise. R.K.O., 1941 .

Kane walks in from left, places a plate in front of her, pretending to be a waiter.

He bends down to kiss her on the fore-head. Camera is tracking slowly forward

I’ve never been to six parties in one night in all my life.

Ft. fr. that her sentence in shot 10 appears to follow on without interruption. )

“Citizen Kane”

Ft. fr.

Ft. fr. pre-ceding shot); he is eating. He looks up from his food.

M.S . Kane (in different clothes from pre-ceding shot).

Ft. fr.

34 M.S. Leyland sitting on hospital balcony

in his dressing gown. After a pause:

The passage conveys the gradual breaking-up of a relationship. It is a fl ash-back of Leyland’s account of Kane’s fi rst marriage: as such, the conception of the scenes underlines the sense of inexorable deterioration in Kane’s relationship with his wife which Leyland implies in his account. The separate episodes are joined together to form a mounting pattern, and together make a self-contained sequence. Each short episode in itself ( 9 – 14 , for instance) is of little signifi cance: it is the gradually developing estrangement in the incidents — progressing from passionate love to cold hostility — which gives the passage its point.

Technically there are a number of points well worth attention. It was clearly the intention that the series should be more than a string of separate episodes: each incident should be implicit in the previous one. Hence the editing is devised to make the passage appear a unifi ed whole. In each case, where there is a transition from one breakfast scene to another, the transition is carried out through a sort of fl ickering pan. This is in each case a switch from Emily to Kane, and is merely a variant on the constant to and fro cutting. More importantly, Emily’s words are car-ried over each transition giving an impression of the continuous process of estrangement which is taking place.

At the same time the director has been at great pains to establish the quick transitions from scene to scene as concisely as possible. He has done this with all means available: the changing mood is conveyed through the dialogue which gets terser and more hostile throughout the passage; the scenes get shorter and shorter, giving the impression that Kane is fi nding the breakfasts increasingly irksome; the music, though continuous, subtly underlines the mood of each scene and rounds off the passage in low, discordant tones suggesting an atmosphere of suppressed, dormant rage; fi nally, the steady deterioration from admiration to hostility is most powerfully suggested by the acting.

Dialogue , rate of cutting, music and acting (and, incidentally, the costumes) have all been used to convey the precise state of the relationship in each episode. This precision has led to a striking economy. (Note, for instance, that the passages of time between adjacent breakfasts are implied by the merest hint: a fl ickering image lasting a second and a change of clothes.) In under 200 feet of fi lm, an extremely intricate develop-ment has been conveyed with clarity and assurance.

This conciseness of presentation is obviously the result of thorough script preparation. (The very choice of breakfast as the setting for the conversations was an inspiration!) There is nothing fortuitous about the order and

relation of the separate impressions — as is so often the case with the unscripted formula kind of montage — and the passage has been conceived as a complete entity already in the script.

Unlike the continuity-link montage, this passage has considerable dramatic power. The montage form is used because it happens to be the most fi tting method of presentation. Indeed, it is diffi cult to see how the gradual change in the relationship between the two characters could have been so economically conveyed in another way. But having decided that the situation needs to be shown in a series of fl ashes, it was still necessary to provide a good dramatic reason for showing it in this way.

It might indeed be objected that the passage is artifi cial in its method of presentation and therefore does not carry the conviction of straight narrative. The objection would be valid if the passage were placed in the middle of a straightforward fi lm. Actually, its framework is the fl ash-back of Leyland’s reminiscences, and Leyland, it has been previously established, is giving a cynical, strongly biased account: the sequence is seen as if through a distorting mind. Thus although the treatment comes dangerously near to caricature, it is justifi ed by the setting. There is a dramatic reason for showing the events in over-simplifi ed montage form: Leyland, we are prepared to imagine, is describing Kane’s marriage in a series of pointedly exaggerated impressions and that is the way we are ready to see it.

Similarly well-founded montage sequences, which are quite different in mood, occur in such diverse fi lms as Pygmalion and On the Town . We need only mention them briefl y. In Pygmalion , there is a sequence in which Liza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller) starts on an intensive course of speech-training. Her bewilderment at the com-plexity and strangeness of her new surroundings is most forcefully expressed in the fast montage of gramo-phone records, recording instruments, metronomes and other paraphernalia. The sequence is, of course, utterly unreal, but it makes its point because we are seeing it through Eliza’s confused eyes.

In the opening sequence of the musical On the Town we see three sailors, on twenty-four hours ’ shore leave, setting out to paint the town red. A montage sequence of the three sailors inspecting and dancing around the many sights of the town takes them from place to place while they are uninterruptedly singing the opening chorus “ New York, New York, is a wonderful town! ” There can be no question of “ realism ” here. The fast, gay confusion of colourful images forms a fi tting background for the opening song and most delightfully supports the joie-de-vivre of the whole fi lm.

The three sequences from Citizen Kane, Pygmalion and On the Town show how the montage pattern can be used in a variety of dramatically effective ways. These have, if anything, been too little explored. In each case there is a valid dramatic reason why the spectator is suddenly asked to view the action in a different, more artifi cial way. In each case, in other words, the form of presentation is appropriate to the dramatic content. To decide that a particular series of facts is most conveniently told in short fl ashes is not enough: the dramatic content of the situation must also be in harmony with the montage form. Without this harmony of form and content, the montage sequence becomes at best a clumsy way out of continuity troubles, and at worst, an unjustifi able piece of trickery.

“ T he skill of the artist . . . [i.e., the director] . . . lies in the treatment of the story, guidance of the actors in speech and gesture, composition of the separate scenes within the picture-frame, movements of the cameras and the suitability of the settings; in all of which he is assisted by dialogue writers, cameramen, art-directors, make-up experts, sound-recordists and the actors themselves, while the fi nished scenes are assembled in their right order by the editing department. ” ¹ This is how Paul Rotha has summarised the nature of the creative work which goes into the production of the normal story-fi lm. It is perhaps an over-simplifi cation: the “ treat-ment of the story ” is a phrase which embraces many functions; and the continuity of shots which the director has planned on the fl oor and which the editor interprets in the cutting room, may — and often does — entail a more positive attitude to editing than Rotha implies. But on the whole the picture is fair.

The maker of documentaries is concerned with a different set of values. His attitude to fi lm-making “ pro-ceeds from the belief that nothing photographed, or recorded on to celluloid, has meaning until it comes to the cutting-bench; that the primary task of fi lm creation lies in the physical and mental stimuli which can be produced by the factor of editing. The way in which the camera is used, its many movements and angles of vision in relation to the objects being photographed, the speed with which it reproduces actions and the very appearance of persons and things before it, are governed by the manner in which the editing is fulfi lled. ” ² Here , then, one is dealing with an entirely different method of production, a method in which editing is the fi lm. It is important to realise that this difference of approach is not simply due to the caprice of one school of fi lm-makers as opposed to another, but arises out of a fundamental difference of aims. A story-fi lm — and this will have to serve as a working distinction between documentary and story-fi lms — is concerned with the development of a plot ; the documentary fi lm is concerned with the exposition of a theme . It is out of this fun-damental difference of aims that the different production methods arise.

This distinction is necessarily rather vague. It is of course true that many fi lms, quite distinctly “ documentary ” in fl avour, have used a plot, and that many commercial story-fi lms show a marked documentary infl uence.

The distinction is one of total emphasis rather than of subject-matter alone. Thus Nanook of the North can be considered a documentary because its “ plot ” is merely a dramatised rendering of the fi lm’s theme, namely, the life of an Eskimo. On the other hand, a fi lm like Scott of the Antarctic is a story-fi lm: it is the adventure story of a set of characters with the setting in the Antarctic, not an essay in Antarctic exploration.