Montage

Jacques Aumont, Timothy Barnard

Description

Describing editing as cinema's formal and aesthetic soul because of its ability to represent time, in this wide-ranging essay Jacques Aumont surveys the theory and practice of editing and montage from early cinema to the digital era. Aumont addresses the Soviet filmmaker-theorists of the 1920s, of course – he is a translator of Eisenstein and the author of a book on Eisenstein's montage – but also brings into the discussion contemporary directors such as Jia Zhangke, Abbas Kiarostami, Aleksandr Sokurov, Kathryn Bigelow and Lisandro Alonso, with stops along the way for the ideas of André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
This original essay is essential reading by one of the leading film scholars at work in the world today and a rare opportunity for English speakers to enjoy his work. This expanded and revised edition adds a dozen pages to the original volume.
"We have entered into a period in which the reign of vision has become contested by that of the image, with the result that editing has changed nature, because its job is no longer to regulate a succession of shots as much as it is to regulate a succession of images. And while the shot has a responsibility towards reality, the image is responsible only to itself."
— Jacques Aumont

Montage 3 Notes 65

Sujets

• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Histoire du cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Film
• ART
• Electronic
• General
• Cinema
• Film editing
• History of film
• Film theory
• Performing arts
• Video
• General officer
• Film criticism
• Film director
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: Caboose
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781927852347
• Langue: English

Extrait

PUBLISHED WITHOUT FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE, PUBLIC OR PRIVATE
Second revised and expanded edition
© copyright 2013, 2020 Jacques Aumont Translation copyright © Timothy Barnard ISBN 978-1-927852-34-7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher, which holds exclusive publication rights.
Montage is part of the caboose essay series Kino-Agora
Published by caboose, www.caboosebooks.net
Designed by Marina Uzunova and Timothy Barnard. Set in Cala type, designed by Dieter Hofrichter, by Marina Uzunova.
Contents
Montage
Montage
‘A lovely word. It has everything it needs to be popular’.
The Western and the Scientist, or the Paradox of Editing
The cliché of the absent-minded professor is ubiquitous: someone whose head is so full of serious things that there is no room for everyday trifles. Scientists forget their umbrellas just about every where, when they aren’t opening them up to sit on them, thinking they are chairs. Niels Bohr, the inventor of quantum physics, liked to go to the movies. Upon leaving a silent western with Tom Mix, he said something to this effect: ‘That the scoundrel runs off with the beautiful girl is logical; it always happens. That the bridge collapses under their carriage is unlikely but I am willing to accept it. That the heroine remains suspended in mid-air over a precipice is even more unlikely, but again I accept it. I am even willing to accept that at that very moment Tom Mix is coming by on his horse. But that at that very moment there should also be a fellow with a motion-picture camera to film the whole business—that is more than I am willing to believe’. 1
Like many silly stories, this one touches a trouble spot. What do we see when we watch a ‘classical’ film? A series of moving images, each of which comes from the continuous recording of an event that took place before the camera. As long as one of these images remains on screen, 2 we have an analogical trace of the event. To call it the result of looking makes it more metaphorical still: machines don’t look, only people look. Yet the moving picture camera, a machine for transacting the visible in a directional manner, resembles our eye so closely on this point that the comparison is almost natural: the camera lens is like an eye, thus it is an eye, and each moving image on screen is a trace of ‘looking’ at a real event. When the next image appears, it depicts another event from a different camera angle at another moment. The trouble arises from the fact that, on screen, the second image follows on from the first without a break. We are presented with a baffling experience (and one which baffled many in the beginning) whose continuous visual flow nevertheless refer ences events produced discontinuously. It is because of this imaginary reversion, which makes us see the referent where there is only an image, that we can share Niels Bohr’s astonishment and have the impression of a look that jumps through space in the wink of an eye.
Naturally, no one’s eye has jumped. The human eye of the operator and the metaphorical eye of the camera took their time finding their spot, taking up position and waiting for what had to be filmed to be organised and set up before them and then finally recorded. The film is the intermittent trace of this shooting; its changing images are the conventional signal that we are passing from one segment of the shooting to another. Because viewers of the Tom Mix western didn’t pay to see fragments of the trace of a shooting, but rather to be told a story in images, they see the film as a fabricated image of an imaginary world : a complete image made up of many partial images following on one after the other. The paradox arises when one sees the film as the natural image of a fabricated world —as the recording, the continuous indexical trace, of the world of the diegesis. To do so is to mix up two quite different contracts: either the film is a series of traces of what went on in front of the camera, or it is a narrative instrument which exists purely by agreement. Either the film shows, or it tells: this distinction is the rudiment of film narratology and has been explored from back to front. 3 To put Bohr’s mind at ease, it would have been enough to point out to him that he was mixing up the reference to reality (the film shoot) and the reference to the imaginary (the diegesis). (As for the implausibility of the story, which is a product of the script alone, it has little to do with the ‘unlikelihood’ of the camera operator’s ubiquity.)
Just the same, wherein lies the force of this anecdote? Without a doubt in the fact that this confusion is something we all share— because cinema was invented, or at least developed, to cause it. The reason the Lumière brothers’ invention had ‘no future’ was because it was limited to the ‘view’, to the recorded trace. The future was the fiction factory, serial westerns with unlikely yet accepted twists and turns. By playing the fool, Bohr put his finger on this agreement, more profound than that which leads us to accept the most idiotic adventures: the agreement by which moving images on the screen refer to the diegesis and not to the film shoot. In other words, quite simply, the playful pretence which constitutes the fiction contract. 4 We are all ready to accept as possible any story whatsoever, as long as it does not differ too greatly from the catalogue of accepted stories of our day. As for possibly sensing the presence of the filmer within the filmed, this has taken so many forms over the past fifty years— both direct, such as the appearance of the clapboard or camera in the image, and indirect, such as the signals of every kind that remind us that ‘this is an image’—that our awareness of what a moving image is, and what a film made up of such images is, has evolved. 5 And yet the cinema of these first decades of the twenty-first century is still defined, for the most part, as the art of telling stories through a succession of disconnected yet linked points of view. Correlatively, editing was initially and remains the art and manner of making those links.
From Machinery to Glue
The word ‘montage’, in French, was first used in connection with machinery and plumbing. Sergei Eisenstein, who in 1923 took up the word in the footsteps of others, informs us of this, amused at the source and promptly drawing bold inferences from it. It has become difficult, nearly a century later, to imagine that this was the first meaning of the word, so much has its use in film become prepon derant, but Eisenstein was right to remark that this lovely word had everything it needed to succeed. Changing the point of view on a single event was not only the semiotic and aesthetic means by which the animated pictures of Lumière and others like him eluded the curse of the pure spatio-temporal trace; it was also the source of an idea of the shot , and its correlative idea, editing. Over the past twenty years several scholars have pointed out the existence in the Lumière catalogue of ‘views’ containing several takes. 6 In many cases it was less a premeditated decision than improvised or even accidental. When the operator filming Mr Loubet at the Races ( M. Loubet aux courses , Lumière cat. 1031 , 1899 ) or The Duchess of Aosta at the Exposition ( La Duchesse d’Aoste à l’exposition , Lumière cat. 1184 , 1899 ) saw that the place where he had chosen to stand while waiting for these personalities was not the best, he simply changed spots. And because he could not make these important figures repeat their entrance, he changed position in ‘real time’ and provided us with a trace of this: for a brief moment—the time it took him to move—he did not film. For a viewer of the Lumière picture, this was a defect, a hole in the normal fabric of the film. Effort was required (of ­perception perhaps, of tolerance most definitely) to accept it. To a film historian, this is the very beginning of shots being edited together. In Firemen: Depart of the Fire Engine ( Pompiers: La Sortie de la pompe , Lumière cat. 76 , 1896 ), the intervention appears more deliberate. It is obviously composed of two quite similar half-pictures—either two successive ‘takes’ or, more strangely, the joining back together of an initial picture cut in two, with the second half becoming the first.
We should steer clear of teleology, but we can already read much into these two examples, and at the very least the essential difference between ‘editing in the camera’ and editing after the film shoot. The former, editing without glue during the film shoot, would become rare, the preserve of a few experimentalists who turned it into a theoretical manifesto: didn’t Jonas Mekas, for years running, keep a filmed ‘diary’ in this form? For the industry soon to be born and rapidly develop, the latter prefigured a much better solution: the editing of takes separated in time and carefully glued together afterwards. A better solution because, as the little story about Bohr illustrates, it makes it possible to link anything one wants however one wants. In principle unrestrictedly, in any event; the history of films is there to remind us that this lack of restriction quickly became relative. In the space of a few years, the range of what was possible was limited by the appearance and then the elaboration and con solidation of rules designed to make these successive partial pictures acceptable to our eye and to our mind. 7