Eva Martn Escobar

THE IMPORTANCE OF MONTAGE IN SURREALIST CINEMA

When

the

Limire

brothers

presented

their

new

invention,

the

cinematograph, in a small salon in Lyon on a december 28th 1895, they did it with fear, because they never trusted too much on its economic or artistic possibilities. But, as we all know now today, their machine was a total succeed and, with its bird, started the history of cinema. At the beginning, the cinematograph was used to register daily common things; they just put the camera where they wanted and recorded. The new invention, used just in that way, didnt have any future, and Edison and Lumire brothers knew it. But there was someone who didnt agree with that thought. Edwin S. Porter, one of Edisons assistants, has the great idea of assembling some series of fire scenes that they had in their records, mixing them with some others of firemen recorded by himself. The result were called Life of an american fireman (1903), and it turned to be the first montage film in the history of cinema. Through the years, cinema evolved and also did its own language, with directors as D.W. Griffith, considered to be the father of this language and the inventor of the invisible montage, which pretended that the directors work wasnt obvious, which means that the viewer didnt notice the montage. However, not every directors have always agreed with this idea, specially in europe, and thats why (with obviously some other reasons which dont interest us right now) the bird of the avant-garde had place in the old continent. One of the aesthetic movements appeared in Europe in the 20s century will be the Surrealism, and its way of making movies will be very close to the way these films are edited and to the possibilities that montage can offer. Surrealism borrows a lot of characteristics from the movement that precedes it: the Dadaism (or Dad), specially because of the opposition to traditional art and the breaking up with the past conventions.

But, in spite of been very closed, Surrealism can be distinguished by its oneiric focus of reality. It is built from psychologic values and the study of human mind, and wants to reproduce the world of dreams in art. Thus, surrealists say that only when the thought escapes from censures, prejudices or any other kind of control, it can be totally free. And, to get this purpose, a lot of directors in those years recurred to images which could make he viewer feeling different impressions, but always avoiding a logical order. For example, we can find films as Un Chien Andalou, where the sequences, apparently absurds, go on like if they were a nightmare. The poetic and the macabre join together to transport us to the world the unconscious. And all that can be made thanks to the montage. Another good example of the surrealist style would be the collaboration between Dulac an Artaud in The Seashell and the Clergyman, in which we can see, in a more obvious way than in Un Chien Andalou, the cinemas capacity to produce meaning through a group of images which create their own sense, totally independent from the logical language that we are all used to.

Thus, to get these effects on the public, surrealist cinema uses techniques that are only possible in the montage room, such as fast montage, overprinted images, blurs, fades, weird cuts, absurd unions between sequences and takes, confusing times and spaces... And everything with the objective of getting some optic effects which would be able to give the viewer a non-conventional sight of the reality which doesnt follow any established moral or ethic values. It reveals us an oneiric world that, through those montage effects, doesnt obey to time, space or reality limits, letting our unconscious walk free, as if we were in a dream.

A good example for all this is the film by Luis Buuel LAge DOr, in which, in order to guide the spectator to that freedom, Buuel uses several tools as an alternate montage, overprinted images and black fades which have here even more prominence than they has in Un Chien Andalou.

Thus, Buuel, and with him the rest of the surrealists, uses cinematographic techniques that help them creating automatisms and reproducing oneiric situations. At this point, anyone could notice the very important role that montage plays in the surrealistic film making. However, its necessary that we remember all these ideas to clear that the montage was born as an ordering and organizing principe, and that the difference that surrealist films make is that, instead of organizing the sequences in a logical order, it makes it in a way that the assemblage of its unconnected images get an own meaning when the director modifies or joins them together using the montage techniques we have mentioned above. On the other hand, surrealist film also focuses a big part of its objective in the viewerss experiences, and montage is a very important process to get to the spectator, in order to induce those sensations. But, above all, montage is an unavoidable part in the success of surrealist films because this artistic movement wants us to feel as if we were in a dream world and, as our unconscious has its own language, surrealism needs to create its own code too. And getting to that new language is absolutely impossible without montages help. Thus, montage is so important in this artistic movement because through it the director can make association of images, new ideas that can emerge from the collision of forms, objects and movements to get inside the viewers mind and work with it as if he were in that oneiric world that surrealism constantly looks for.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Millar, Gavin; Reisz, Karel, Techniques of the cinematographic montage 2, section 4, Madrid, Plot Ediciones, 2003

Breton, Andr. 1977. Surrealist Manifesto. Barcelona, Ed. Labor, 1995

Wendy Everett, 1998. Screen es threshold: the disorientating topographies of surrealist film 141-152. Videos: Un Chien Andalou(Buuel and Dal, 1929), La coquille et le clergyman (Dulac, 1928), L'Age D'Or (Buuel, 1930).