Montage and Long Take
Previously, in my mind, the word “montage” is something just about art, so when I first encountered the MATLAB function montage1, I felt its name is vivid and a little romantic. But today I look up the on-line Longman dictionary2, and find that it’s probably not an exclusive noun for art, and may resemble the word “collection” or “set”, but “montage” highlights that the elements (pictures, film, or music) are combined (or rather, organized) in an interesting and unusual way.
montage
- [uncountable] the process of making a whole picture, film, or piece of music or writing by combining parts of different pictures, films etc in an interesting and unusual way.
- [countable] something made by combining parts of different pictures, films etc in an interesting and unusual way.
-
montage of, e.g., a montage of flowers, a photo montage.
- Examples from the Corpus
- In another life, your team must have been a montage.
- In short, this film of which I dreamed was not a montage of standard scenes and stock characters.
- It played these roles thanks to impeccable photographic skills, including montage and front-projection.
- a photo montage
- The proportions alter according to the final placement within the montage.
- This montage involved a combination of movement which progressed from a short solo performance to interweaving by the sextet.
So, not that serious.
Having said that, I still watch some on-line contents, which introduce montage from the point of view of art, like the video, “Top 10 Best Montages of All Time”, from YouTube channel “CineFix - IGN Movies and TV”3:
Basically, montage can “fracture space-time reality and narrative for the sake of abstract” and “chop a big story up and tell it very very fast”. It’s a very efficient expression method in some certain aspects, like “joke delivery”, “compress time, making gradual change seem far more dramatic”, “take a half dozen different storylines and wave them together”, “reveal hidden similarities and differences by virtue of some good old compare and contrast”, and so forth.
Some films I’ve ever seen appear in the above video, and to my mind, one of the most representative films showing what is montage is a fiction action film, Edge of Tomorrow (or Live Die Repeat)4. It’s a vivid example.
As a comparison of montage, I think of another film, that is Before Sunset5, directed by Richard Linklater6, and played by Ethan Hawke7 and Julie Delpy8. This film greatly shows what is “long take”910. As an audience, I prefer long take to montage, because I can feel more details and sincerity conveyed by the director and performers from it, although it looks simple.
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset11
…
Linklater: … You have these long takes, long Steadicam shots following them unobtrusively. You know, in the first film the camera really commented on [the characters] and enhanced their feeling. I’d pull back and you’d see them in the foreground with the opera house in the background. This was the opposite. I wanted it to seem like we were just following these people in as real a way as we could get and still seem like some kind of narrative fiction. I was just taking this idea that I’ve often worked from in movies: make a documentary about characters acting out a fiction. It’s this Godardian idea12 from a long time ago.
Filmmaker: Could you explain a little more about this?
Linklater: I think if you’re going for some kind of reality, your goal is to try to represent a reality as much as you can without it actually being a reality. This is fiction, these are fictional characters, and this is all written text. We’re not improvising on camera. But that’s the feel we’re going for, a certain spontaneity. It’s a lot of work for the actors — more than they’ll ever get credit for — the fact that everything is rehearsed like a play. Every beat, every gesture, every little moment is actually preplanned.
Filmmaker: Every moment in that film was highly rehearsed?
Linklater: Yeah, and yet the goal is to make it not seem like that. So that was a huge challenge. There’s nothing to hide behind for them. We can’t cut out of a scene that didn’t work because of how [the film is] structured geographically and timewise. We couldn’t just cut to a long shot of them walking and change the subject. It’s one conversation. We cut out hardly anything. We couldn’t — we committed ourselves to the dialogue, the ideas, everything. So that was a long process. Ethan and Julie had to get to some level that’s rarely required of an actor. So I was just so proud of them in the way they dug into themselves so much. [They’re playing] characters who are only parallel to themselves — that’s not Ethan and that’s not Julie, but we’ve created this universe where they could be, you know, themselves.
Filmmaker: To me, the story is about a fantasy that’s now suddenly staring these characters back in the face.
Linklater: I think what’s at stake is their own realities. It’s the biggest issue I think you can face about yourself: the person you are versus who you want to be, who you think you are versus who you really are, what you want versus what you really have. Big issues. It’s not slight, even though it’s often treated in kind of a slight way, but that’s the way life is. We treat it slightly, but it’s really important. People obsess about things that don’t seem important and blow off things that in fact are a big deal, like who you are, what you’re really doing, where you’re committing your passion and your energy. So I don’t know — to me that’s about as deep as you can get in a personal way. So I wasn’t worried about the story ever not seeming that it’s a big deal.
References