My selection of clips for the recent short assignment may have given the false impression that all montages were training montages.
Here's a clip from the Gene Kelly musical Singin' in the Rain (1952). At about 3:30 there's a one-minute montage that is supposed to represent Hollywood's sudden transition into sound film (talkies). Singin' in the Rain is approximately contemporaneous with Montage of a Dream Deferred.
The film history being presented is misleading, by the way; it suggests that Hollywood converted to color film musicals overnight, which wasn't the case. For context, here's a clip from the film usually considered the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927).
There's another kind of montage, which also uses sequences of short shots but which doesn't necessarily indicate compressed time, used in Soviet avant-garde film. Here's an example from Eisenstein's October (1928).
While we're on the subject of film, I'd like to make a plug for the Pacific Film Archive, located next to the Hearst Gymnasium across the street from the Berkeley Art Museum. Screenings are cheap for Cal students, and they're running several exciting series this semester. The PFA often screens films you can't see anywhere else. I highly recommend it!
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The more we learn, the more and more it seems that we discover how those things we learn relate to our daily lives. I’ve never really thought about those montages in movies and never even really noticed that they were there. After being introduced to this concept of showing the passage of time and progress, I can see how they affect the movies that they are present in. Montages are really common; I think that they’re in almost every movie I’ve seen. Even cartoons use this same tactic to show a passage of time and with that to usually show progress. It’s really interesting that by using cinematic montage, that everyone who watches gets the same idea. How are we to know that the passage of time is being represented by this sequence of scenes? It’s just interesting to see a method so strategically planned out that everyone will interpret it the same way.
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