وظيفة المونتاج ، كتاب فهم السينما

montage

Our attention has been focused until these lines on the means of cinematic expression in its relationship to the single shot, which is the basic unit in building films. Shots in cinematic films, with the exception of follow-up shots and long photography, tend in any case to acquire meaning after seeing them along with other shots and after building them into a coherent serial clip produced. Editing physically is the linking of a film slide (one shot with another. The shots are linked together to form scenes The scenes are linked together to form sequential clips. On the mechanical level, montage removes unnecessary time and space. Through the association of ideas, montage links one shot to another, one scene to another, and so on. Despite the simplicity through which the idea may seem, the montage process represents a major cornerstone in the art of film. Terry Ramsey, one of the first film critics, referred to montage as “the linguistic structure of cinema, the language of grammar in it, and like grammar, the linguistic structure of montage must be learned, otherwise we do not have it deep inside.

Montage has evolved into an art of wonderfully complex facets since the 1900s, and each passing decade offers new variety and new possibilities. Before the end of the century, most films consisted of short stories filmed in long shots and in one run. When the raw film was almost finished, the circular shutter quickly closed. The time span of the shot was equal to the scene in length. The first films were essentially little dramas in long takes recorded on celluloid, with the camera still and the actors still in the distance. The scene was going on continuously in which screen time and real time were equal. For example, the central idea of ​​one of the early films was about a man throwing a party for a number of girls. Then the circular veil ends with all the actors noisily leaving the scene.

After the year 1900, the ambition of filmmakers increased, and naive narrative stories appeared for the first time in France, England, and America. There is no longer just veiling, but stories,” which required more than one scene and more than one continuous shot. Continuity was the problem. No matter how strange it may seem now, the filmmakers of this period were worried about the audience, who they thought would not understand the relationship between one story (a shot) and the other story. To solve this problem, they used to seek help from the regular theater for help. Here, the curtain was the accepted custom, which took the place of moving in time or space. The curtain was in fact connecting the scenes The different chapters into a cohesive whole. The fading in the film was the curtain for the theatre, very simply. The fading meant the diminishing of the light at the end of the scene until the screen blackened and then the next scene appeared gradually to reveal to us mostly a new location at a different time. The two scenes were usually united by the presence of the same actor. Since 1899, the Frenchman, Georges Millier, has made a short film entitled Cinderella in twenty arranged scenes.

It didn't take long for the directors to start cutting within scenes, in addition to cutting between one scene and another. This renewal is usually credited to the American Edwin S. Porter, although in the 1900s an Englishman named J.A. Smith inserted a large shot into the scene, and another Englishman named James Williamson inserted an interval shot within a sequence of a cruiser in one of his films. These innovations were completely neglected until Porter came and dealt with them later independently. Porter's film entitled (The Life of an American Firefighter) (1902) pushed the montage idea a step further, including the film that deals with a simple story of a firefighter performing a heroic rescue of a woman and her child, seven scenes, the last of which is three shots. Different: the first of which is the arrival of the fire engine to the burning building, the second shot of the woman and the child trapped inside the burning building, and the third external shot of the firefighter carrying the woman and taking her down the stairs (the last act was repeated in the process of saving the child).

Such a scene would have traditionally been filmed in a distant shot that shows the entire action in a continuous run of cameras.. Porter's breaking of the continuity of the scene into three different shots essentially placed the shot, not the scene, as a basic unit in building the film. This new montage idea introduced the idea of ​​different perspectives into the film. Most films up to that time had been filmed in a long still shot at the approximate position that a real viewer of the accident would have taken. The duration of the scene is almost equal to the duration of the real incident. However, the shots to external and internal locations enable the viewer to be in both places quickly. In addition, the elapsed time does not depend on the duration of the break The scene thus introduced a new self-time that depends on the time of the footage different than the actual event.