On the subject of Montage

Many years ago Eato and I lived around the corner from each other in Lewisham, SE13. One evening we watched Le Weekend by Goddard, several times. That film, its choppy editing techniques, the absurd presence of a drummer in the woods, the non-linear narrative, has remained with me and has influenced my work ever since (listen "Poaching with Nellie (2003)). If I am to understand my approach to form then I must understand the discourse on montage.

All quotes from 'Montage' Sam Rohdie, Manchester University press

On Sergei Eisenstein:
"The third is a binding. This is achieved by association. Associations can be distant in time and distant spatially" (pp31)
"the shot is often ruptured by the successive one, a close-up held too long, or a distant association suddenly evoked, or an action that has no logical precedent, or an action that is beyond the frame), its lack of finish, sustains it, like a held note or a memory that never completely fades from the film, and when it is met agina in an echo, it is never quite the same. The echo does not conclude any shot, but reopens it, causes it to reverberate. It is a resurrection." (pp34)

On David Wark Griffith:
DWG's great achievement "was not this or that narrative technique of editing or shooting but his realisation (conscious or not) that the image had first to be detached from what it represented enabling it to attain autonomy and independence as an image" (p 43)
"No perception is without memories ... (Henri Bergson)*
"Intolerance consists of four stories separated historically in time and space. the gaps between the stories are considerable. ... Each story was a story of intolerance through the ages. Rather than telling the stories consequtively ... Griffith intercut each story with the other such that an incident in one time and space would be related to (answered) by another incident in another time and space ... a resonance and a memory" (p48)
"Parallelism in the film is essentially between separate places in simultaneous times and between symmetrical themes of remembering and forgetting" (p53)

On Eric Rohmer:
"The image is not for signifying, but to show ... for signifying, there si an excellent tool, spoken language" (fn p60)

On Jean Renoir:
"I do not think that the only way to make films is to begin at the beginning and end at the end as if is one huge scene. Personally, I prefer a method that conceives each scene as a small film in itself" (p95)

On Alain Resnais:
Discussing 'La Guerre est finie'
"That voice is, like that of the narrator, exterior to the car (it has no face), but unlike the narrator, it turns out to be interior to the fiction, being the voice of the driver describing his thoughts earlier in the journey." (p122)
"Multiple identities, voices from elsewhere, voices without faces, false voices." (p122)
"Interior with exterior, past with present, narrating and narrated." (pp 123)
"What is presented by the film are fragments, not f a whole or of continuities later to be reconstituted, but by kernels, nuclei of disparate, shifting, inconsistent elements that can generate others, or atomise and proliferate. Each term is like an exile, like Carlos, a refugee in a foreign land where nothing is clear and nothing what it appears to be. The lack of settlement and certainty of direction, time, place makes each shot a living thing, not tied and shackled by needs of succession, drama, sense or definiteness, 'held' in place. Instead shots are open to association, allusion, interlacing and the imaginary.
Wherever Carlos is, he is simultaneously elsewhere ... Every detail resonates with others or receives echoes from afar that transform it." (p123)
>>> cv- transplant the word tourist for exile; Yorick for Carlos; music phrase/ section for shot.
"With Resnais, the shot is affirmed by its discontinuity, thereby liberated to join other shots without losing itself, as in a collage. The classic film, in erasing the join between its fragments, for the sake of succession and action gains a fiction (the fiction of continuity), but loses the reality of itself (the reality of discontinuity)" (p124)
"Distinctions of real and imaginary, present and absent, past and present, are not secure because the images of the film are not secure" (p 131)

Conclusion: "Resnais's montage is not an operation of finding accords in relation to a succession, a logic or a continuity, but of the opening out of images towards others that they seem to call to or beckon, not a link, nor a binding, but affinities." (p132)


On Jean-Luc Goddard online LINK :
"In the Histoire(s), Godard is on a journey to the past of the cinema, to a vast underworld of images and scenes. As he proceeds, figures from the past emerge liberated from the film emulsion that contains them. Each of the encounters seems involuntary, as unheralded as Marcel's madeleine, and when they occur, Godard, like Marcel, refashions them, accepting them and refusing them in the gesture of making them his own and making the past of the cinema its future. (Is it not like the gesture of Wayne in The searchers when he takes Debbie in his arms? Debbie is real and a memory. Wayne wants to obliterate the memory, the image, but reality, the person, forces him back to accept. )

None of Godard's memories or citations are ever unmediated. They come to him as what they are and, at the moment they arrive, are different than they are, recalled from the dead, shadows and traces of themselves. And they are unmoored, taken from the film they once were part of, disconnected from their origins to be reconnected into another beginning, into other cloths, other films, other sequences"

*Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason (wikipedia)