Post by Doghouse6 on May 29, 2018 2:06:35 GMT
The 1930s were the heyday of the time-compressing montage; their rapid-fire style was especially well-suited to hard-boiled crime stories, backstage musicals or cafe society tales of scandal or the wealthy and dissolute, and they served as effective visual shorthand...
- Roaring presses; newsboys hawking on street corners; hot-off-the-presses front pages spiraling toward the camera with 10-point headlines blaring the progress of dragnets or sensational courtroom trials
- Fire engines or police cars and motorcycles racing out of station houses and careening along crowded city streets
- Cocktail shakers and downed-in-a-gulp martinis; dancing feet, jazz bands and floor shows; marquees and neon signs
- Pages flying from desk calendars, interspersed with shots of the changing seasons represented by windblown leaves, snow-laden branches and budding twigs
- Harried dance directors slave-driving tapping chorus lines; arguing songwriters and librettists; frustrated orchestra leaders tearing scores and their own hair
...all accomplished with a series of dissolves, wipes, Dutch angles and superimpositions, characteristically with urgent musical accompaniment.
Although it's introductory, immediately following the opening credits of Universal's 1932 Night World, this astonishing montage establishes the milieu into which the film is about to plunge, and is as representative of the style and pace of such sequences as any:
Some other examples:
In 1933's The Invisible Man, a radio bulletin alerts the public to a homicidal menace, followed by deadbolts being locked, doors barred, windows nailed shut and vigilante husbands grabbing shotguns while their wives cower, and disembodied voices of alarmed citizens are heard: "Lock your doors!" - "Take no chances!" - "I'll keep him out!" Director James Whale provides a wry coda, as his montage concludes with the source of all the panic sleeping peacefully all the while.
The Gay Divorcee (1934) - After a chance encounter, Fred Astaire is smitten with Ginger Rogers, but has no idea of her identity. Resolving, "I'm gonna find that girl if it takes from now on," he sings and dances "Looking For A Needle In A Haystack" in his apartment, then prowls the streets of London, in his sport coat by day and tux by night, against an instrumental accompaniment of the same song, doffing his hat expectantly to this lady or that, only to bow and withdraw in apologetic disappointment, and a series of dissolves parades one comely female face after another across the screen, but none of them are HER.
Clark Gable, on a binge after a friend is killed in an air race, is pursued by devoted buddy Spencer Tracy in Test Pilot (1938). Leaving the last night spot in which Gable was seen, Tracy barks to a cab driver, "Next bar," after which composer Franz Waxman's furious strings and staccato brass take over as bar sign after bar sign, saloonkeeper after saloonkeeper and bartender after bartender in city after city are seen before the errant aviator is finally found sleeping it off in a Chicago hotel room, having been tracked all the way from Cincinnati.
By the '40s, the fashion had begun to cool and, when used, the device was often employed as flashback and, rather than simply propelling the story with economic velocity, provided background both contextual and substantive, sometimes incorporating brief pauses for dialogue:
Casablanca (1942) - A bleary-eyed Bogart lets his mind drift back to Paris in the spring of the previous year in a sequence that fills in the story behind their tense reunion of that evening, beginning with a montage of newly-discovered love: Bogie and Bergman motoring in the city; a dissolve that occurs only in the rear-projection plate magically takes them from the city to the country; they're laughing and sharing peanuts on a ferry down the Seine; they're dancing cheek-to-cheek to "Perfidia" under the glitter of a mirrored ball.
Laura (1944) - To the clipped narration of Clifton Webb as Waldo, the rise of presumed-dead Laura Hunt from awkward apprentice to advertising powerhouse and elegant lady-about-town - along with Waldo's growing obsession with her romantic entanglements - is seen.
Nearly the entirety of Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Blvd (1950) consist of narrated flashbacks, incorporating brief montage sequences - Walter's minute-by-minute preparations on the night of the murder and Norma's day-by-day ones for her anticipated return to the screen, for example - throughout.
Just as it had at the dawn of the talkies, cinematic technique backslid somewhat in the '50s as directors and crews became familiar with new big-screen technologies, and montage sequences that were throwbacks to late silents and early sound films appeared in historical epics, romances and comedies alike. By the late-'60s and early-'70s, the fashion had become that of scoring such sequences to pop songs as central characters walked along beaches, reclined in sylvan glades (and even had sex in them, as in 1971's Play Misty For Me), tried on funny hats, played arcade games or shopped for the ingredients of gourmet dinners (always arriving home with baguettes and bunches of flowers conspicuously peeking from the tops of grocery bags).
Whither the future of the story-propelling montage? My new-movie viewing has fallen off markedly in the 21st century, but from what I've seen, it's alive and well, although adapted to the even more rapid tempo of the post-MTV era: Wall Street and tech wizards climb the ladder of success as their activities become both more frenetic and more assured while their wardrobes, autos, domiciles and recreations keep pace; starship crews humorously cope with new but mystifying technologies; mythical warriors train for battle with equally-mythical foes in equally-mythical worlds; edgy thrillers reconstruct unseen details of crimes in visually arresting flashes as master investigators Explain It All.
Suitable to any style or era, the montage - in whatever form - is likely to remain a reliable element of cinema language.
- Roaring presses; newsboys hawking on street corners; hot-off-the-presses front pages spiraling toward the camera with 10-point headlines blaring the progress of dragnets or sensational courtroom trials
- Fire engines or police cars and motorcycles racing out of station houses and careening along crowded city streets
- Cocktail shakers and downed-in-a-gulp martinis; dancing feet, jazz bands and floor shows; marquees and neon signs
- Pages flying from desk calendars, interspersed with shots of the changing seasons represented by windblown leaves, snow-laden branches and budding twigs
- Harried dance directors slave-driving tapping chorus lines; arguing songwriters and librettists; frustrated orchestra leaders tearing scores and their own hair
...all accomplished with a series of dissolves, wipes, Dutch angles and superimpositions, characteristically with urgent musical accompaniment.
Although it's introductory, immediately following the opening credits of Universal's 1932 Night World, this astonishing montage establishes the milieu into which the film is about to plunge, and is as representative of the style and pace of such sequences as any:
Some other examples:
In 1933's The Invisible Man, a radio bulletin alerts the public to a homicidal menace, followed by deadbolts being locked, doors barred, windows nailed shut and vigilante husbands grabbing shotguns while their wives cower, and disembodied voices of alarmed citizens are heard: "Lock your doors!" - "Take no chances!" - "I'll keep him out!" Director James Whale provides a wry coda, as his montage concludes with the source of all the panic sleeping peacefully all the while.
The Gay Divorcee (1934) - After a chance encounter, Fred Astaire is smitten with Ginger Rogers, but has no idea of her identity. Resolving, "I'm gonna find that girl if it takes from now on," he sings and dances "Looking For A Needle In A Haystack" in his apartment, then prowls the streets of London, in his sport coat by day and tux by night, against an instrumental accompaniment of the same song, doffing his hat expectantly to this lady or that, only to bow and withdraw in apologetic disappointment, and a series of dissolves parades one comely female face after another across the screen, but none of them are HER.
Clark Gable, on a binge after a friend is killed in an air race, is pursued by devoted buddy Spencer Tracy in Test Pilot (1938). Leaving the last night spot in which Gable was seen, Tracy barks to a cab driver, "Next bar," after which composer Franz Waxman's furious strings and staccato brass take over as bar sign after bar sign, saloonkeeper after saloonkeeper and bartender after bartender in city after city are seen before the errant aviator is finally found sleeping it off in a Chicago hotel room, having been tracked all the way from Cincinnati.
By the '40s, the fashion had begun to cool and, when used, the device was often employed as flashback and, rather than simply propelling the story with economic velocity, provided background both contextual and substantive, sometimes incorporating brief pauses for dialogue:
Casablanca (1942) - A bleary-eyed Bogart lets his mind drift back to Paris in the spring of the previous year in a sequence that fills in the story behind their tense reunion of that evening, beginning with a montage of newly-discovered love: Bogie and Bergman motoring in the city; a dissolve that occurs only in the rear-projection plate magically takes them from the city to the country; they're laughing and sharing peanuts on a ferry down the Seine; they're dancing cheek-to-cheek to "Perfidia" under the glitter of a mirrored ball.
Laura (1944) - To the clipped narration of Clifton Webb as Waldo, the rise of presumed-dead Laura Hunt from awkward apprentice to advertising powerhouse and elegant lady-about-town - along with Waldo's growing obsession with her romantic entanglements - is seen.
Nearly the entirety of Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Blvd (1950) consist of narrated flashbacks, incorporating brief montage sequences - Walter's minute-by-minute preparations on the night of the murder and Norma's day-by-day ones for her anticipated return to the screen, for example - throughout.
Just as it had at the dawn of the talkies, cinematic technique backslid somewhat in the '50s as directors and crews became familiar with new big-screen technologies, and montage sequences that were throwbacks to late silents and early sound films appeared in historical epics, romances and comedies alike. By the late-'60s and early-'70s, the fashion had become that of scoring such sequences to pop songs as central characters walked along beaches, reclined in sylvan glades (and even had sex in them, as in 1971's Play Misty For Me), tried on funny hats, played arcade games or shopped for the ingredients of gourmet dinners (always arriving home with baguettes and bunches of flowers conspicuously peeking from the tops of grocery bags).
Whither the future of the story-propelling montage? My new-movie viewing has fallen off markedly in the 21st century, but from what I've seen, it's alive and well, although adapted to the even more rapid tempo of the post-MTV era: Wall Street and tech wizards climb the ladder of success as their activities become both more frenetic and more assured while their wardrobes, autos, domiciles and recreations keep pace; starship crews humorously cope with new but mystifying technologies; mythical warriors train for battle with equally-mythical foes in equally-mythical worlds; edgy thrillers reconstruct unseen details of crimes in visually arresting flashes as master investigators Explain It All.
Suitable to any style or era, the montage - in whatever form - is likely to remain a reliable element of cinema language.