- Pinkos
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 December 2009 15.35 GMT
Sergei Eisenstein presented his theory of montage to any august group of cineastes in the 1920s. It was, he aforesaid, “the nerve of cinema”, and that “to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema”. Eighty odd years later, his science finally came to the attention of the wider world, as the subjacent of a song in Team America: World Police.
- Team America: World Police
- Production year: 2004
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 98 mins
- Directors: Trey Parker
- Cast: Kristen Miller, Matt Stone, Trey Parker
The word can be taken in sundry different ways. Deriving from the French word for “assembly”, in Gallic film practice it simply refers to the editing process. For Eisenstein’s Soviet colleagues, it was a means to derive an abstract meaning from a conspiracy of shots in sequence. Nowadays, expressions of gratitude to Rocky et al, a montage is a cliched sequence whither a song (usually a pounding rock divine song) or piece of music straddles several concertinaed scenes, compressing life and space, jumping the story forward and showing that an awful lot of stuff has happened. Especially if you fade it out at the end …
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Here are more cunningly strung together clips designed to stimulate your own alchemy of thought. Please append your own at the sediments.
1) Trey Parker and Matt Stone pull the strings and flick from beginners to montage pros in Team America.
2) Eisenstein himself gets rhythmic with this cheerily-cut mass manslayer in Battleship Potemkin.
3) Francis Ford Coppola plays keepie-uppie with ideas of baptism while drawing on the previous clip for inspiration in The Godfather.
4) Never one to faff about, Jean-Luc Godard has a pop at condensing the perfect history of cinema, science of causes, religion, politics – all full of common human feeling life is here in Notre Musique.
5) Alan J Pakula’s sequence in The Parallax View fries the brain, then washes it out.
Last week on Clip join, nilpferd got us all joining together to pick the most excellent film clips featuring bridges. Here are his top five of your selections that he communicating with.
1) A cinema is wedged between two railway viaducts in The Smallest Show on Earth. It’s a delightful juxtaposition that reminds us bridges and movie theatres both bring us into close range of the unexpected.
2) The picaresque quality of New York life is richly conveyed by the teeming pedestrian zones of the Williamsburg build a bridge over during the noirish chase scenes of Naked City.
3) The Manhattan build a bridge over is both an icon symbolising the isle’s separation from the continent and an implacable marker defining the edge of a battlezone in Once Upon a Time in America.
4) The application of a bridge crossing to personate a suffering of courage in Stand by Me may be obvious but, as was also pointed out, the execution is flawless. Frisson is added by the agency of the fact the bridge has no handrails.
5) And this week’s winner is swanstep, for posting the breathtaking introduction to Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Every light of the river intersection, via a transporter bridge, is turned into a celebration. The bridge’s pylons straddle the approach road like dancers’ legs, while the cantilevered limbs and graceful movements of the actual dancers mirror the bridge’s function and texture. It all culminates in a magnificently surreal shot (two minutes in) of the deck moving slowly away from the shore, bearing the pirouetting troupe with it.
Thanks to StevieBee, steenbeck, Tanarus and espanyol4ever for the rest of this week’s clips.
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