Notes on Eisenstein's Methods of Montage - Part Three - The Tonal

Tonal Montage: Transitions are employed to illicit a specific emotional response from the audience.

This is a scene from Damien Chazelle's Whiplash (2014). Ostensibly it's a film about a drummer. By any means it's a film about a drummer. Why would this be a good example of tonal montage?

Whiplash, Damien Chazelle (2014)

Despite the rhythmic theme of the film, you can't carry a feature film narrative on tub thumping alone. For me this scene is more about emotional hits than the complexities of jazz drumming. We witness the nervous father, the talented son and the erstwhile, maligned teacher. It's all about the reactions. That's not to say the sound isn't hugely impressive.

Unsurprisingly, this film took Oscars and BAFTAs for editing and sound amongst others.

One of the few films I've deliberately watched repeatedly and enjoyed every time.

Attributed to Tom Rolf... "I love you"

Tom Rolf, (editor on Taxi Driver (1976), Jacob's Ladder (1990), Heat (1995) and Equilibrium (2002) amongst others) offered this comment. I can't find a definitive source for the quote but it rings true. 

“Is it better to say, ‘I love you,’ bang, then cut to the reaction? Or is it better to say, ‘I love you,’ hang on it for a beat to show the emotion of the person delivering the line, then go for the reaction? 

It’s a matter of choice. 

Either way, there’s a different result for the audience looking at it. 

Are their sympathies with the guy who said the line, or the girl who said the line? Or is the audience saying, ‘Don’t believe him, he’s going to screw you over’… 

If you find the frame to cut on at that right moment, the audience will be totally satisfied.”

Quote attributed to Tom Rolf, Editor

Not a Tom Rolf edited scene. Very much a sequence of action and reaction shots maintaining eye-line and tempo, both rhythmic and tonal. Mick Audsley takes the editing credit on this one.

 High Fidelity, Stephen Frears (2000)

Notes on Eisenstein's Methods of Montage - Part Two - The Rhythmic

Rhythmic Montage: Shot length is dictated by visual elements such as movement and composition.

Taken from the Planet Doc series Land of the Dragons, this series of shots shows us the courting rituals of the Fiddler Crab.

There is a visual continuity throughout the scene. The colours of the crabs and their environment give us a background of browns and yellows with flashes of brilliant red and orange from the male crabs’ claws. Although portrayed with temporal continuity, I suspect that this is actually a montage of many different shots over an extended period of time. As one crab looks very much like another, only the narrator’s contribution and some directorial decisions tie the shots into a story.

https://youtu.be/gXceF_kx2h0?t=2m7s

The twitching movements of the crabs lends a tempo to the transitions (hard cuts), an example of rhythmic montage. Most shots are not cut on action but in the spaces between. A suitably rhythmic electronic soundtrack is also employed to accentuate this twitching rhythm.

Shot 1	Eye level mid shot. The female crab quickly feeds herself
Shot 2	High angle, long shot. Two males have approached and wave their claws for attention. Two waves to the rear, three waves to the fore before the cut to close up.
Shot 3	High angle mid shot. Starting with a metallic hit on the soundtrack, the shot features the bright orange claw in the centre third. If that weren’t a strong enough image, the orange object in the background also points us down along the claw. Two waves before the cut to a reverse angle.
Shot 4	Reverse angle eye level mid shot. Starting with another metallic hit. A rival appears. Composed in reverse, in opposition. This crab’s claws are on opposite sides though giving a compositional continuity, the bright orange shapes appear consistent. In this shot though, the claw has moved further up the screen perhaps portraying dominance. Two waves back before a cut to a high angle long shot.
Shot 5	High angle long shot. The brightly coloured males leave the shot, one remaining (bottom centre of screen) before moving off screen left. The soundtrack, an electronic rhythm (high hat?) reflects the skittering movements of the crabs’ legs. As he is about to leave shot, there is a cut on action
Shot 6	Eye level tracking shot. The electronic rhythm continues. The crab remains in motion, moving screen left as the camera tracks. Visual continuity is maintained, the bright orange claw remaining screen left. The crab is now facing away from us however. His claw has swapped sides. He approaches a female and is spurned. Cut to extreme close up.
Shot 7	Eye level extreme close up. The crab’s eyes are in sharp focus, his claw remains at screen left as he looks out for another mate. Two waves and the sound is cut four beats before the next shot. Our crab is deflated.
Shot 8	Eye level medium close up. Soundtrack is a higher pitched, cleaner electronic rhythm. Very similar to shot 1, we see the female alone having escaped our protagonist’s advances. She moves off screen left followed by another male. Pointedly, this opponent’s claw is presented from the reverse side as he steals the girl.

The Madness of Fibonacci and the Strobe

Just indulge me on this one...

https://youtu.be/nom7NiTLrFg

Persistence of Vision - Brain or Eye?

As I'd casually mentioned "persistence of vision", I thought I'd drop in a note. After all, if it wasn't for this quirk of our eye/brain mechanism, the zoetrope, cartoon or photographic film would never have been invented. If they had, they would have appeared to us as a stream of stills, a passing curiosity in an avant garde art form maybe. 

http://leah-reynolds.com/files/leahreynolds/zoetropes3d_copy.jpg

"The theory of the animated cartoon preceded the invention of the cinema by half a century. Early experimenters, working to create conversation pieces for Victorian parlours or new sensations for the touring magic-lantern shows, which were a popular form of entertainment, discovered the principle of persistence of vision. If drawings of the stages of an action were shown in fast succession, the human eye would perceive them as a continuous movement."

http://www.britannica.com/art/animation#ref715172

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Sparkler_Circle.jpg

We've become so accustomed to the illusion of rapidly changing images as a representation of movement that it's easy to forget it entirely. At least as children we could be amazed that we could draw circles in the air with a sparkler.

"Persistence of vision is a commonly-accepted although somewhat controversial theory which states that the human eye always retains images for a fraction of a second (around 0.04 second). This means that everything we see is a subtle blend of what is happening now and what happened a fraction of a second ago. 

In film and video, this phenomena is often claimed to account for our ability to perceive a sequence of frames as a continuous moving picture. However this idea was debunked in 1912 and there is no scientific evidence to suggest that persistence of vision works in this way. Rather, it is thought that the illusion of continuous motion is caused by unrelated phenomena such as beta movement (the brain assuming movement between two static images when shown in quick succession). 

Despite this, persistence of vision continues to be incorrectly taught in schools as the physiological mechanism behind video's illusion of movement."

http://www.mediacollege.com/glossary/p/persistence-of-vision.html

There may be some dispute over the hows and whys of the effect. For a film maker or animator, isn't it enough to know that the audience will accept 24 or 25 pictures per second as natural movement?

For now.

Notes on Eisenstein's Methods of Montage - Part One - The Metric

Metric montage: Shots are of equal length or number of frames

To take essentially organic elements, a performance or a scene and apply this strict method of timing appears the simplest yet least forgiving and most stylised treatment.

In searching for examples, I found it difficult to identify a piece of film that complied with this strict timing method that had not been produced specifically for the purpose of demonstrating it.

This student film is an example of an entire short film adhering strictly to the metric method.

https://youtu.be/BfWzqKy1sFg

Each shot is shoe-horned into the same number of frames. It doesn’t appear to advance any story nor increase the visual appeal of the piece. It may be that metric montage is not intended to stand in isolation.

There are brief moments in Eisenstein’s own film October (1927), shots of a machine gunner and his weapon. The shots are rapidly and repeatedly edited to perhaps only a few frames each with a short fade transition. This almost gives us a Thaumatrope-like effect. Our persistence of vision not quite merging the two images.

https://intelligentheritage.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/thaumatrope1.jpg

Even without sound, these short, metric montages do convey the physical violence of the gun shots. The images are hammered at the audience as the gun is fired into the crowds. If the individual shots had been held any longer, the effect would be subdued, less violent. Any quicker and the images could have merged as in the Thaumatrope effect. 

Stills taken from: October, Sergei Eisenstein (1927)

https://youtu.be/SJBNkh5xJvY?t=15m21s