Those boring passages where nothing happens
The term montage refers first of all to cutting, and second to the theory, proposed by those critics who believed that there was no art to taking a photograph, as photography was a strictly mechanical process (apparently those critics had never taken a photograph in their lives, or if they had, had never looked at it), the only ‘art’ in the cinema lay in the juxtaposition of two images to evoke a third, or other idea. There was set design and acting, of course, but those were ‘properly’ theatrical arts, and so editing, or montage, was the one true cinematic art.
Later on, in Hollywood, the term montage was applied to those sequences of quick shots that summarize a passage of time. This is the sense of the term I mean here, because it’s the one that screenwriters ought to know about.
The Love Romp
Usually today, montage is used for romance, and covers the first blush of love. Fully developed scenes are written to cover the conflict of desire and elusiveness, the flirtation, the courtship of the lovers. This culminates in the first kiss, the first romantic kiss, or the first full intimate encounter.
At this point, the troubles of pursuit and capture, of the wooing, are ended: the two lovers have agreed they love each other. That suspense, of ‘will they get together?’ is also ended. This point might be the end of some plots, but in Hollywood tradition, a simple ‘boy gets girl’ is not enough; instead the formula is used of ‘boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back’ or some variant of it.
And yet, we in the audience do want a chance to savor the capturing of love, its bloom and freshness, before the cloud of trouble and loss darkens the sky. The problem is, nothing dramatic happens during this period of the honeymoon. The lovers begin happy, they are happy, they go on being happy.
We can endure sustained misery, for it contains its own suspense. No character likes being miserable, and so while he is unhappy he is fighting against it and searching for a way out of it. But this is not true of happiness. Characters do like being happy, and want to go on being happy. They don’t want it to change.
As a result, the honeymoon period is usually handled briefly. There is a feeling that the audience wants it. Structurally, it works better if the lovers have this time together in order to deepen their involvement before the forces arise that threaten to break them apart. But there is no suspense in this period, and so, dramatically speaking, it is boring.
So it’s covered in a montage of shots of the lovers together.
A similar logic covers the ‘rise’ period of a success story. Take a tale that deals with the hero’s career. His start is dealt with in detailed scenes; there is suspense in whether he will get his foot in the door, get his first break, and whether he will gain any success from that chance. He may well fail, and have to start over again, before he wins that first success. But from the point of first success, there is a period like the lover’s honeymoon, in which the hero gets more success and more success, and rises toward the top of his profession. Again, there is no drama here; the hero does well, he goes on doing well, he does better and better. We in the audience would like to share in this rising spiral of success, as if it were our own. Structurally, it works better for plausibility if the hero climbs the ladder of success one rung at a time, and we see a few of those rungs surmounted along the way. This not only makes it easier for us to believe he has reached the top, but it gives us a bit of time to invest ourselves in his rise and his success — all the better to make us fear for its loss. What is won at some effort is treasured all the more.
The next dramatic moment, both for the lovers and for the career success, comes when, at the height of their achievement, the cloud comes that will threaten their love or his success.
In between the first kiss and the threat of the other woman (or illness, or poverty, or what-have-you) and in between the first glimmer of success and the moment when, on top of his profession, the hero faces the risk of losing it all, comes the montage.
Quick, and Interesting
What is important for the screenwriter to bear in mind is that during the period the montage covers, nothing happens dramatically — and we know it.
The audience at this point splits in two. There is the party that wants to revel in the love, the success, the violence, or whatever the main sensual appeal is of the sequence. But there is also the rest of the audience, who waits impatiently for ‘the story to start up again.’ For the story pauses while the montage plays.
In the theater, an act break would do instead of montage. The curtain falls, it rises again: the lovers have been together a year, the hero is the darling of his professional world, the gangster is head of the underworld and the most feared man in the city.
For the sake of those of us who just want to get on with it, then, the montage should be designed to be as brief as possible.
The montage should also be designed to appeal to the senses. This is, properly speaking, the realm of other departments of the crew: the production designer, the camera, the musical composer, the actors. The screenwriter can help them if he proposes scenelets that will inspire them to their best.
How many scenelets are enough, how many are too many? For this, you must count on your own feelings as you watch similar movies with montages that serve the same purpose. How long do they go on, how many shots and scenelets are in them, and do they feel to you sufficient? And does your interest begin to flag at any point?
Music and Songs
There is one type of montage that goes outside the screenwriter’s reach, and that is the montage that fills a song.
Songs are used to sell movies. Get the right song in a movie, get it to play outside the theater, where people like it, and the producers can boost the movie’s popularity. But where can a song go, if the movie is not a musical? The montage offers a perfect place, for dialogue is unimportant in a montage, and is usually foregone.
In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the decision was made to use a song over the ‘love triangle abloom’ montage. The song was famous, and beloved, and popular: ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’ But I personally disliked that song, and so to me that montage is hard to watch. And yet the montage must linger to fill up the running time of the recorded song. This might have been about three minutes, which was a standard length for a popular song at the time. Three minutes! that’s three pages of script — an eternity, and so precious in even a feature length movie.
Foreboding and the Montage
In a tale told in words, the talesman could open what is his equivalent to a montage with some such line as,
For three weeks, we were happy, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky…
We should have known it couldn’t last…
Right away, the audience keys on the phrase, ‘for three weeks.’ So it ends in three weeks? What will happen then? And why? This provokes in us a sense of foreboding, a tension and suspense. We know the cloud is coming, and we know when it will come.
This is built in to the nature of tales told in words as we have developed them. We use the past tense, and so a period of time, when we sum it up, will normally begin with a reference to its duration.
Movies unreel in present tense, so this path is not allowed us as screenwriters, with one exception. Where a tale is told in flashback structure, the flashback does happen in past tense, and is moreover narrated. The voice of the narrator, when used, can reproduce the exact phrasing of the montage in tales told in words:
For three weeks, we were happy, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky…
We should have known it couldn’t last…
If you watch many Hollywood movies produced in the late 1940s, when the flashback was in vogue, you will find this tactic used extensively.
The flashback is out of favor now, though, and so this avenue is available to only the rare screenplay.
(Composed on keyboard Sunday, June 15, 2008)
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