This takes a look at Montage which is throwing two images together that aren't related to create a new emotions and meanings.
A Royal Holloway slideshow.
A Critique of the Proposed National Education Policy Reform
88 88 and Take What You Can Carry
1. MA1052 CRITICAL THEORY AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
SESSION 2: MONTAGE
88:88 (2015, Isiah Medina)
Take What You Can Carry (2015, Matthew Porterfield)
2. Every time I get back into the editing
room, I feel the wonder of it. One image is
joined with another image, and a third
phantom event happens in the mind’s eye
– perhaps an image, perhaps a thought,
perhaps a sensation. Something occurs,
something absolutely unique to this
particular combination or collision of
moving images. (Scorsese 2017)
Source: Scorsese, Martin (2017) ‘Standing Up for Cinema’ Times
Literary Supplement, 31 May 2017. Online: http://www.the-
tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/
3. Bastien on phone on
balcony, as seen by Lily.
Lily in dressing room
with actor.
5. [On the use of ideograms in Japanese script:] The combination of two
hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as
their product, i.e. as a value of another dimension, another degree; each,
separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination
corresponds to a concept…. By the combination of two ‘depictables’ is
achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable.
For example: the picture for water and the picture for an eye signifies
‘to weep’; the picture of an ear near the drawing of a door = ‘to listen’;
a dog + a mouth = ‘to bark’;
a mouth + a child = ‘to scream’;
a mouth + a bird = ‘to sing’;
a knife + a heart = ‘sorrow,’ and so on.
But this is—montage!
Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are
depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content—into intellectual contexts
and series. (Eisenstein 1963: 29-30)
Source: Eisenstein, Sergei (1963) ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’, Film Form, London: Dennis Dobson, pp.28-44. Written 1929.
6. At regular intervals [Pudovkin]
visits me late at night and
behind closed doors we
wrangle over matters of
principle. A graduate of the
Kuleshov school, he loudly
defends an understanding of
montage as a linkage of
pieces. Into a chain. Again,
‘bricks.’ Bricks, arranged in
series to expound an idea.
I confronted him with
my viewpoint on montage as a
collision. A view that from the
collision of two given factors
arises a concept. (Eisenstein
1963: 37)
Source: Eisenstein, Sergei (1963) ‘The Cinematographic
Principle and the Ideogram’, Film Form, London: Dennis
Dobson, pp.28-44. Written 1929.
Linkage–P Collision–E
7. Old and New (1929, Sergei Eisenstein)
The first six shots of the cream separator sequence
8. Old and New (1929, Sergei Eisenstein)
Six consecutive shots from the middle of the cream separator sequence
9. Old and New (1929, Sergei Eisenstein)
Six consecutive shots from the middle of the cream separator sequence,
following shortly after those on the previous slide
10. Replacing one changing face with a whole scale of facial
types of varying moods affords a far more acutely
expressive result than does the changing surface … of any
single professional actor’s face.
In our new film [Old and New] I have eliminated
the intervals between the sharply contrasting polar
stages of a face’s expression. Thus is achieved a greater
sharpness in the ‘play of doubts’ around the new cream
separator. Will the milk thicken or no? Trickery? Wealth?
Here the psychological process of mingled faith and
doubt is broken up into its two extreme states of joy
(confidence) and gloom (disillusionment). (Eisenstein
1963: 42)
Source: Eisenstein, Sergei (1963) ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’, Film Form, London: Dennis
Dobson, pp.28-44. Written 1929.
11.
12.
13. There is no material in the movie whereby I
wouldn't have lived it, or my friends wouldn't
have experienced. Or you might actually be
seeing the actual moment in the movie.
There's something special about the way that
we can capture our lives as they happen. I
want to demonstrate that, that there's no
need to create, because what's in front of us
is already worth thinking about and worth
trying to think through with the cinema.
(Medina in Geary 2015)
There is no fiction in the movie, only the
present. This all happened to us as it was
being filmed. When we meet on our free
time, all we know is this: we will make cinema
together. There is some 'staging': perhaps
only the handcuff scene cutting to P or non-P,
and a masked woman. (Medina 2016)
Sources:
― Geary, Adam (2015) ‘In Conversation with Isiah Medina’, Winnipeg Free Press,
29 August 2015. On-line: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-
life/entertainment/movies/in-conversation-with-isiah-medina-323304621.html
―Medina, Isiah (2016) ‘Director’s statement: Isiah Media introduces 88:88’ MUBI
Notebopok, 11 March 2016. On-line: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/director-
s-statement-isiah-medina-introduces-88-88
14. If you can't pay your bills — say your electricity gets cut off, your
water, your heat — then once you're finally able to pay it... all the
digital clocks in your home will flash 88:88. The idea is that this is a
demonstration of the fact that, in the movie, basically, the people
stop resetting their clocks to the time of the world because the poor
don't live in a time that progresses, but in suspended time...
(Medina in Geary 2015)
I think any cinema worthy of the name is an attempt to start again,
just to start thinking again. You can't always continue with the
same... You become kitsch, right? That also comes back to the title
of 88:88. That's the time you see when your clock starts again.
(Medina in Geary 2015)
Source: Geary, Adam (2015) ‘In Conversation with Isiah Medina’, Winnipeg Free Press, 29 August 2015. On-line:
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/movies/in-conversation-with-isiah-medina-
323304621.html