Monaco. J. (2009) How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, Multimedia-Language, History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Montage, as the “grammar” in film shots, provides a more complex form of presentation for plot narration. This is a building action, that is, by overlapping or joining two adjacent shots end to end, a third meaning that neither of the two shots originally possesses is created.
According to the classification in the text, the functions of montage are very rich, and different types of montage present different narrative methods. For instance, “Theft of Dreams” employs a large number of parallel montage to depict a series of actions taken by different characters at the same time to escape from multiple dreams: In the first layer of the dream, Youssef, in slow motion, drives a truck off a broken bridge in the rain and falls. In the second layer of the dream, Arthur, at a normal speed, attempts to bind his companions in the weightless hotel corridor and use the elevator shaft to escape from the dream. In the third layer of the dream, Ims engaged in a fierce gun battle in the Snow Mountain Castle category. In the Lost Realm, Cobb and Saito have a conversation in a dilapidated Japanese castle. Although the scene time and time flow rate in each dream level are different, Nolan enables the audience to understand that these events occur at the same time through high-frequency cross-cutting between these levels. Without this montage technique, The audience would not understand the concept of “The Kick”.
Montage is positioned as the core of film editing techniques. The article points out that mis-en-scene is the fusion of complexity within a single shot, while montage pays more attention to the connection logic between shots. As the theory expands, film creation will continue to rely on this tool – because it has successfully elevated film from an “intuitive art” to an “analyzable language science”.