To create my sensation in my short film I relied heavily on associative imagery and the tonal montage, which Sergei Eisenstein argues relies prominently on the “emotional integrity” of the shot. Thus this is used to enhance the “emotional tone” throughout the sequence. For me, the reaction I was aiming for was laughter followed by the emotions of doubt and intrigue through the use of the laugh track supplementing the visual on screen demanding engagement and laughter. I continued this thinking through Hitchcock’s notion of cutting to manipulate the actors presented

 

 

 

 

 

by rearranging the footage to construct a new narrative. An example of this in my film would be returning from an ad break to find everyone disinterested and the host in despair, only to quickly cut back to his persona and introduce the musical act. This was heavily inspired by The Eric Andre show and editing (specifically in the Tyler The Creator interview.)

Recently I shot a music video for another class which relied on green screen to overlay our protagonist over videos or backgrounds of him running and through the positioning of him in addition to what was behind or in front of him, would illustrate him running away and towards an objective, with the figures in the video representing that. For this, we relied heavily on montage but more specifically the rhythmic and intellectual forms of montage, with rhythmic being the most obvious of cutting to the rhythm of the song, however intellectual being conveyed through its imagery and the relation of those clips in regards to the concept. The most famous example of intellectual montage would be the cut in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey during the introduction of the Ape throwing the bone into the sky and then cutting to a spaceship to illustrate the passage of time and the evolution of tools. With the footage I had and the objective of my recent short film, there was no way I could make use of the intellectual montage but in regards to experimental film or extracting meaning within another film, the intellectual montage has the potential to create entirely new and un-intended meaning in the hands of another editor.

An example of this would be Martin Arnold’s Alone. Life Waits Andy Hardy (1998) which takes footage from Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney films and constructs an Oedipal relationship between Rooney and his mother, which Arnold would later argue that this film was in protest of Hollywood’s depiction of sexuality, arguing that it is a “cinema of repression”.

A more recent example is the connection found between Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” and Spike Jonze’s “Her” as essayist Jorge Luengo Ruiz conveys in his video essay combining the two films shot for shot to mirror one another and to convey how the two directors relationship fell apart and how they depict that relationship on screen.

In this essay titled “Lost in Translation/Her: An Unloved Story”, Ruiz’s editing captures the potential mirrored emotions the two filmmakers have in regards to each other, with the tag line accompanying the video “Three Persons. Two Cities. One Feeling.” Through no dialogue and a song from the soundtrack of Her recorded by Arcade Fire, Ruiz creates a narrative outside of the film to add extra meaning and depth within the stories of the films entirely using intellectual montage, demonstrating the effectiveness of editing and how audiences can create external meaning.

Thus, to tie this back into my own short film, while this isn’t something I could replicate I feel that this is an interesting and unique perspective to have towards filmmaking and editing and it is something I would like to experiment with in the future by filming associative images to create meaning.

References:

Davis, E. (2018). Watch: Fall In Love With The Symmetry Of Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ & Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost In Translation’ In This Video Mashup. [online] IndieWire. Available at: https://www.indiewire.com/2015/04/watch-fall-in-love-with-the-symmetry-of-spike-jonzes-her-sofia-coppolas-lost-in-translation-in-this-video-mashup-265495/ [Accessed 16 Oct. 2018].

Zryd, M. (2014). Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy. [online] Senses of Cinema. Available at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/alone_life_wastes_andy_hardy/ [Accessed 10 Oct. 2018].

Marshall, C. (2013). Alfred Hitchcock’s 7-Minute Master Class on Film Editing. [online] Open Culture. Available at: http://www.openculture.com/2013/04/alfred_hitchcocks_seven-minute_editing_master_class.html [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

Fusco, J. (2017). Watch: 5 Essential Types of Montage to Use in Your Film. [online] No Film School. Available at: https://nofilmschool.com/2017/08/film-montage-types-eisenstein [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].