Group Members: Jack Clancy, AJ Guff, Flo El Kumeshi, Caroline Kahlenberg, Tara Quinn.
Manifesto:
The objective of our montage is to parody the way the term montage has come to be understood in Hollywood and the overall American film industry. We want our montage to address how this can be done successfully.
Through our readings on the theories of Pudovkin and Eisenstein in combination with our class understanding of montage, we have extrapolated Eisenstein’s formula with a twist. We employ the equation A+B=C as a means of colliding two disjunctive events to create meaning rather than narrowing in on the collision of two disjunctive shots. Given this variation of Eisenstein’s theory in conjunction with our storyline—in which two male athletes undergo intense training to open jars of peanut butter and jelly—we have constructed our own equation: Event A (training) + Event B (opening peanut butter and jelly jars) = C (parody).
In addition, we choose to convey the narrative without dialogue, but rather with music. We feel that the most effective means of communicating the narrative is contingent on the actions and expressions of the characters. Thus, playing “Eye of the Tiger” in correspondence with two athletes training guides the viewer to focus on the athletes’ actions and facial expressions. We further emphasize a viewer’s focus on the imagery through a synthesis of a series of short shots and close-up shots. Through this, we hope to overdramatize the characters’ actions, intensify their facial expressions, and capture their emotions.
We firmly believe that montage is the most effective vehicle for dramatizing and parodying film and that the long take would not have expressed our storyline properly. As mentioned above, the multitude of shots utilized in montage dramatizes characters’ actions and further constructs anticipation of what is to happen next in a scene. As a result, a series of multiple shots enables the viewer to invest his or herself in the scene and dedicate his or herself to the characters on screen. For example, the intercutting of short shots within the temporal ellipsis—which we include twice in our video—not only provides the viewer with a sense of time, but further causes the viewer to think about how the images relate to each other over time. The long take would have taken away from constructing a sense of time for the viewer and his or her anticipation of what is going to happen next.