The second way to organize movies is by form. The action of the movie is propelled by montage or by mise en scene. It's hard to describe these terms historically and without prejudice because each one is loaded with passionate critical baggage. So I feel like I'm discussing the history of the Trinity in a room full of Protestants.
Montage is easy to describe if you've seen a film by Eisenstein. He took small pieces of sometimes very static shots and created great motion and emotion. The shower sequence in Psycho is a great recent example.
Mise en scene is a theatrical term that's been applied to movies: the director positions the actors, positions the camera, and says,"roll 'em!" Sometimes the actors move, sometimes the camera moves and sometimes they both move. We were taught in film school that the master of mise en scene was Jean Renoir ("Grand Illusion") and recent good examples can be found in anything by Stanley Kubrick.
But this is Formalism, and it's so old fashioned that I'm not sure I can convince you that people once believed that movies can fall into one of these two categories. But they did.
Everyone can see that the most heavily edited film still has "scenes" which are "set" and that even the film with the longest, most boring shots still has them strung together, but look at it this way: Where is the passion of the director? Is it in creating something purely filmic, purely synthetic (people used to talk this way) in the editing? Or is the director interested in capturing the perfect motion, the perfect gesture in the scene?
Once again, it's fun to think about which movies fall into which category:
I've said that Kubrick is the right stuff, but on the bad side, 100% of what's made for TV (excepting commercials -- more about this later) is mise en scene's bad stuff.
Montage has been given a bad name by those wordless "montage sequences" where the two lovers get to know each other by going to the beach, the playground, the park, you get it.
If I just say great editing and you think of the Corleone Baptism sequence in Godfather I, you'd be right.
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it seems to me that in terms of classification, there is much more mise en scene direction today as opposed to montage.
ReplyDeletewhen you described "real" montage (as opposed to the montage sequences) i immediately thought of a scene from a movie we studied in sound design class - the opening sequence of Ingmar Berman's Persona. it's all almost-unrelated short clips strung together, and they don't mean much to the plot individually, but together they make you really uneasy and on edge.
anyway i remember watching that and thinking how unusual of a construction it was - like you said the montages we're used to either just cover some story ground quickly (training sequences in rocky) or establish a location (quick shots of different iconic parts of a city). what about the opening of West Side Story?
To make sure I 'got this', tell me if this would be a correct statement.
ReplyDeleteThe categorization depends on the style of the single most integral scene. In Godfather I, montage is used as Michael has 5 Family Heads murdered.
In Scorcese's Departed, he uses Mise en Scene in the warehouse elevator shooting that exposes Matt Damon, then kills Decaprio...
Impassioned arguments of classification might be based upon what scene people think most moves the plot. Classification is based upon the form of this scene.