montage verses long shot
the visual arts
By Gordon graham
The responses of film theorists to this sceptical view can be divided broadly into two groups. First there are those, of whom Eisenstein and Rudolph Arnheim are among the best known, who claim that film has the ability to escape the limitation of what might be called 'inevitable attachment to reality'. Thus, commenting upon the idea that the audience is merely the 'fourth wall' of a stage (the other three being the backdrop and wings), Leon Moussinac says on the contrary 'in film the fourth wall of the room in which the action takes place is not simply left out, but . . . the camera is brought into the actual room and takes part in the story'.
Arnheim, quoting Moussinac on this point, elaborates upon the idea by remarking that film becomes an art form when the mere urge to record certain actual events is abandoned in favour of 'the aim to represent objects by special means exclusive to film'.
These means obtrude themselves, show themselves able to do more than simply reproduce the required object; they sharpen it, impose a style upon it, point out special features, make it vivid and decorative. Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off.
Arnheim's answer to the sceptic, then, is to insist that film can leave 'mechanical production' behind, and in this way film becomes an art form. A contrary view is to be found in the voluminous writings of André Bazin. Bazin thinks that it is precisely the ability to copy what is 'there' that gives film its special role as an art form.
The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. . . . Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention.
These two lines of thought are in large part reflections of different styles of filmmaking. But they are normative as well as descriptive theories and may thus be seen to recommend different techniques of direction. Thus Arnheim's view is both a description and a commendation of films such as Eisenstein's. In these the device of montage, a rapid series of short shots, is used extensively to focus the spectators' attention sharply and drive it through a selection of specific images. Montage departs from how things 'really are', since we do not see the world as a series of discrete visual episodes, and since in Arnheim's view the art in film depends upon such departures from reality, montage is to be commended in the construction of film. Bazin's theory, on the other hand, reflects the style of filmmaking
dominant in America in the 1950s, in which much use was made of medium and long shots, which present a wide and continuous visual field, and this is just the sort of 'realistic' filmmaking Bazin commends.
To appreciate the contrast at work in these two views, consider the following simple episode. A family is having a picnic by a river. Unnoticed by her parents, the little girl is stumbling perilously near the water. The family dog barks and runs to the child. The parents are alerted and bring her out of danger. In a long shot of this episode, the camera and the scene would be so arranged that all the actors would be visible all the time. The camera might focus more clearly on one or the other from time to time, but at no point would anything be out of view. To treat the same episode in montage, there would be separate shots of the family, the child, the parents, the dog, the rescue.
One obvious difference between the two techniques is that montage focuses the spectator's attention in a way that long shots do not. Those like Eisenstein and Arnheim who favour montage, do so because it enables the filmmaker to select and emphasize what they want the spectator to see. 'It is essential', Arnheim says, 'that the spectator's attention should be guided' (Arnheim 1958: 44).
In the episode just imagined, montage makes clear the role of the dog's barking. By contrast Bazin and others favour long shot over montage chiefly because (they allege) this is how we actually see things. We do not see events in separate snapshots. While in montage selected shots are artificially collated, in a long shot the camera follows the actors just as our eyes would, and this is why it is more 'realistic'. More importantly perhaps, they reject deliberate selection on the part of the filmmaker, believing it desirable to preserve a measure of uncertainty in order to preserve the spectator's freedom of interpretation. In the passage omitted from the quotation above, Bazin says, 'It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there a gesture of a child.' Spectators must be left to make such selections for themselves.
There is, however, something of a tension in Bazin's view. On the one hand he commends 'realistic' film because it 'lays bare realities', while at the same time wanting to preserve 'ambiguity'. But if viewers are to have reality forced upon their attention, this necessarily eliminates at least some of the ambiguity. It is not hard to see that at the level which matters, the dispute between montage and long shot is based upon a false dichotomy. Many of the differences between montage and long shot are matters of degree rather than kind, and the exclusive merits of each need not be in competition. The length of a shot is to be understood as merely the time given to the spectator, and this can obviously be longer or shorter. In montage it is less, in long shot more, but there is no radical difference between the two. If the collation of short shots serves some purposes and the presentation of long shot others, a director is free to employ both at different points in the film.
Bazin thinks that the ability of film to 'copy' gives it the means to direct our attention to reality. He would of course be wrong to draw the implication that the director is in any sense passive. The plot, direction, angle and focus of every long shot still has to be worked out. The point to stress is, whatever else they may disagree on, the 'realists' as represented by Bazin share the view of the 'creationists' as represented by Arnheim: the value and interest in film are in its revelatory properties and these properties derive in large part from artistic use of the camera. In other words, both schools of thought in classical film theory aim to demonstrate that film is an art, one by showing how far the use of the camera enables us to depart from mere reproduction, the other how the peculiar power of photographic reproduction gives film an artistic advantage that other art forms cannot enjoy.
The interesting question for our purposes, then, is not whether film can be an art, but whether these theorists have succeeded in isolating features of film that will give it distinctive value. On this of course they differ, and not only between a preference for montage as opposed to long shot. They differ in fact over whether film is strengthened or weakened as an art by the introduction of sound, which brings us back to the issue with which this section began. Is film a more powerful visual art than painting, or does it gain this additional power precisely in so far as it ceases to be a purely visual art?