Montage Principle in Sketching for a Film

Abstract

The article studies montage options in creating the visuals (storyboard, explication, sketches) for a future film. The tasks given to future artists of feature and animated film at the Art department of VGIK include making a series of sketches for the script or a work of art. Such approaches as catching the spirit, the architectural style, the kind of characters and their line of action are fairly well-known. However, the montage sequence of the future movie, the interrelation between separate sketches, the dynamics of on-screen developments, the anticipation of montage choices both in the film as a whole and in separate episodes are less often taken into account. The article gives examples of some montage patterns described in S.M. Eisenstein’s work and the principles that should be applied when creating preliminary sketches. Eisenstein emphasizes that the main task of montage is related to the problem of consistent presentation of the chosen theme. It is demonstrated that a sketch series is a narrative, a pictorial text. Hence, not only stylistic unity is of the utmost importance, but above all the relations between the sketches, when their connection, interrelation gives rise to a new semantic unity and each one of the sketches acquires a new, nondepicted emotional and sensual semantic meaning. This peculiarity is well known in psychology when the thought process is analyzed. There are no isolated mental objects, they always come in pairs and large structural systems that surpass in their integral semantics the sum total of meanings of their constituent elements. Montage as the interaction of contradictions and contrasts must be taken into account while making preparatory sketches. Taking as an example some short series, the article shows how a simple rearrangement of the sequence of images changes the overall meaning of the whole visual artistic narrative.