Narrative Week 7: Montage

Today we looked at some Montage techniques and the power of suggestion through film and imagery. In particular we looked scenes from several sources including the shower scene from Psycho, Frtiz Lang's short "M", Animated short "When the Day Breaks" and "The Odessa Steps" scene from The Battleship Potemkin.

Each of these various scenes included forms of montage which create quite dark and disturbing feelings for the viewer, because much of what happens within the scene is left up assumption and imagination. In the classic Hitchcock film "Psycho" the woman showering is repeatedly stabbed and murdered by a shadowed killer. It is assumed she is stabbed, because at certain points we see a knife and blood pouring down the drain. However there are no scenes where the kife has contact with the woman. This avoids violent and gorey scenes, however in a way it is never truly avoiding it, because the human mind wants to interpret the messages and fill in the gaps between the cuts itself; sometimes picturing a more gruesome image than originally intended. However this can be a good thing because each individual viewer can interpret these messages in their own ways, so the film can be viewed by more than just a select minority who like dark or disturbing scenes.

In class however we took scenes from these clips and rotoscoped the single frame with animal features, to see how it would change the image's affect it has on the viewer. I chose the scene from The Odessa Steps and painted over the soldiers with typical predatory animals, as these are usually seen praying on the weak; as they are in this clip. Since the dawn of storytelling animals such as wolves have been feared and seen as a common villainous creature and one to be cautious about. Usually I do not like the victimization of certain creatures due to their lifestyle, but I chose to use predatory animals in general to get a sense of threat. This is because in the scene the civilians are running in panic and chaos has broken out, because the soldiers are shooting them. I saw this in relation to a typical animal hunt, where the hunters would chase the prey in a pack and eventually take them down. I chose the animals because of their nature, not because of the connotations they carry.

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