The term ‘montage’ is used here because it suggests building up, or assembling, rather than cut-ting away. Post-production is essentially about putcut-ting the different shots and sounds together to bring a work to life from its disparate elements and, while this does involve some cutting away, it is the bringing together that is the essential aspect. Magical things start to happen when you bring disparate elements together. The whole is more than the sum of its parts and this is at the heart of montage – editing. Montage is also one of the most associative parts of the filmmaking process and therefore complex. The juxtaposition of images and sounds is often far from the way we directly experience life and many codes have been established over time that enable the viewer to understand the progression of time, spatial relationships, shifts in perspective, thought processes of characters and so on. The codes of the montage have come a long way since the early days of cinema in which a single shot captured a slice of life. We now have montages that involve jump cuts, interlocking elliptical narratives and multi-layered transitions. Considerations of montage are numerous and include: coverage, continuity, action, movement, juxtaposition, spatial relationships and rhythm, to name a few. Let us focus here on highlighting some aspects of codes related to coverage, spatial relationships and continuity. (There will be a more detailed discussion of editing later in the book.)
Some purist anthropological documentary makers cry foul when there is a cut in a scene. For them, the cut breaches the covenant of truth and authenticity. The unprivileged eye does not cut, but roves from one thing to the next. Therefore, if one is to maintain documentary authenticity,
Shots constantly comparing in Mechanical Love (Ambo, 2007)
the filmed sequence should not cut either. However, this is perhaps misguided. Even anthropo-logical documentary makers are involved in telling stories and the telling of every story involves choosing and organising discourse events, deciding on perspective, selecting a narrative form, selecting what to shoot, what not to shoot, where to shoot it from, how to assemble the narra-tive in its own temporal space, and so on. Even if one were to have a film that was one shot, there are still decisions about the beginning and the end of the narrative, where we are looking, the angles, the textures, the sounds, and so on. These elements all involve the biased decisions of the filmmakers. This is never more apparent than in the montage: the assembling of the images and sounds into a final coherent whole that is going to work as a unit.
Editors are well aware now that contemporary audiences can make the necessary associative interpretations of codes that allow them to be fairly free in terms of which actions and events are actually seen and which are inferred. Do we need to see someone’s entire action when carrying out a task? Do we need to see the whole journey that they have made? What coverage can be dealt with through sound and what can be dealt with by the picture? Because we have machines that, to a remarkable degree, can ‘capture reality’ does not mean that we have to be dogmatic in attempting to reproduce this reality on the screen. We provide the audience with selected bits and have developed a language by which they bring their associations and experiences to fill the gaps. It’s similar to the relationship we discussed earlier between story and discourse (see the example below).
If we see a sequence with a woman shopping for vegetables in a market and the very next sequence is of her clearing food from a dining table and taking the dirty dishes into the kitchen while we hear the sound of children running up the stairs, we will immediately associate that the woman cooked the meal for her family and that they sat down and ate it. It is therefore possible, with two simple shots, to tell the viewer about a much more complex set of actions that are never actually seen. If we were to add to this the fact that the first sequence of the shopping was done with some fast cutting, while the clearing of the dishes was done in one long shot, new associations about the nature and the cooking and the meal will start to emerge; one can therefore look at loading the action not seen with certain qualities and associations.
One of the most effective ways to engage a viewer is to allow them space to use their own ima-gination, experiences and associations. The question of what one shows, and what one does not show, is therefore important. However, the ambivalence that might emerge should not be a question of not being clear about the story (ambivalence is not about hiding). The ambivalence emerges out of the fact that the clear narrative elements one does include have powerful and far-reaching associations and consequences.
It is not just the shot which gives us a sense of space and context. One of the most common codes associated with spatial relationships relates to what is known as the ‘action line’ or ‘cross-ing the line’. While this is an issue that needs to be dealt with at the shoot‘cross-ing stage, it is at the montage stage that one sees the importance of considering this ‘common law rule’. Some filmmakers and cinematic traditions do not adhere to the codes associated with the ‘action line’
and, indeed, some filmmakers deliberately set out to challenge this code for specific purposes. As with any set of codes, they are there to be challenged and adapted.
Editing at the heart of working with archive footage in Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2004)
If you cut together two people talking to each other, you would expect them to appear as in Figure 12.2.
Figure 12.2
Figure 12.3
The dotted line is the action line, an imaginary 180° line between two main points of interact-ing action. What would it look like if one of the camera positions were to cross to the other side of this invisible action line as in Figure 12.4?
Figure 12.4
The consequence would be assembling two shots in sequence that would look like Figure 12.5.
Figure 12.5
Spatially, they seem to be talking to each other, even though they are in separate shots. This has been achieved by shooting them as in Figure 12.3.
To our sense of understanding space, this would not seem right; it would look as though one character were speaking to the back of the other, as though they were not facing each other.
However, in the ‘real world’ they were facing each other. Here we see the importance of spatial compositional codes, such as those associated with looking into empty space, and montage codes, when linking people in space through assembling of shots in a sequence.
Continuity and coverage are, of course, linked. The moment you break up a scene into shots, you are, in fact, breaking the continuity of real-life actions. Nevertheless, viewers still need to order events into a coherent time-line in order to allow them to fill the gaps and, in the final assembling of your narrative, continuity is an important factor. Continuity is not simply about covering action in an expected order, for there is plenty of scope to play around with this order;
it is also about emotional and psychological continuity.
Earlier we looked at the cause and effect of the classic narrative, as well as coincidence in the transcendental narrative. Many of the same issues are relevant for the editor in terms of continu-ity. The editor not only needs to understand how each cut and each sequence work in terms of continuity of action, but he or she also needs to understand about the continuity of emotion and the continuity of psychological behaviour. In the classic narrative, each cut needs to serve the purposes of the linear cause and effect, while in the transcendental narrative the cut must serve the purpose of establishing a lateral state.