I'm sure that all of us have seen a movie, or a thousand. Ever wonder about the 'movie montage'? It's those parts of the movie we doesn't usually pay attention to. That two minute scene where everything about someone(s) is revealed. And if you're like me ,it's those scenes where you drink your drink, smoke yolur shit, or do whatever it is that you do.
I was watching Elf - yeah, Elf - earlier and realized the potential for learning from montage scenes and how they can relate to your main character/narrator.
I'm wondering if anybody else has noticed this, or that maybe I am completely behind the times...
If you've noticed this, tell me/us how it's affected your own writing.
Here's what I am talking about. Each character is defined within this video. Each part comes from a montage - whetever small or large - and shows me/us the way to add a depth to our mc/narrator's voice.
I love this idea Moon. You chose one hell of a flick as an example considering there is so much character development in that film. Almost None of the characters are the same person from it's begging to the end. Well, it would help for a novel that is for sure but you can't do that much development with that many characters in one short story. Also, this example shows me how much more you can play with perception in film than you can in text. Maybe there is a way for fiction but I haven't figured it out yet. Like the scene were the chearleader is all alone on the court and he is all alone in the stands. How do you do that in fiction without using "thought verbs?"
Good movie. Watching that video in a lit-related context reminded me of Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell. It's a novel told in short little scenes which follow each other in time but don't always relate plot-wise. Really, there wasn't much plot to speak of; or there were lots of little plots. I guess it was a bit like a 'montage' on a larger scale with larger pieces.
I've never written anything and thought, "I'm writing a montage."
Thank you Ben for that... Ah, yeah...
'America! Fuck Yeah!'
Anwyay, when I mean, 'montage', I mean character development. How can that two minutes of movie time build up your main or secondary characters? What can, or do, you do in your narrative or dialogue that helps to build up your MC/Narrotor? And, how does, or do, movies help you in this way?
Well, I'd say they help me alot. Movies and people. Honestly, most my life I prefered watching movies to reading books, I'm starting to sway on that a bit. I also like to watch people which helps too. But yeah, if it were not for movies and people-watching I'd have no idea how to develope a character. And I am going to search for montages too. And I am going to write montages for exercises. And I think some of my stories are montages. And I think I've been hanging out at Harry's Bar too much.
I'm drunk, may not make much sense.
Montages are great in movies but harder to translate to page because they ca'n't have music. I'd say the best way to do a "montage" during writing would be little series of vignettes showcasing a person. If you've read Saving Grace by Howie, he did this really cool "routine" scene in the second part showing the character Grace and MIsh in the morning. It showed a lot about the characters without getting overwhelming.
I think my biggest device for revealing character in writing is with thought verbs, unfortunately; my only other method is through another person. I let a really important person in their life talk about them, or think about them, until they come to life. My story from last WAR round -- Undying Love, one of the stories without a match -- did that. I let the husband think about the wife, through memories and phone calls, and it helped a lot.
Did i make any sense?
I just finished reading The Commitments by Roddy Doyle and he has a section in there of about 5 short chapters/sections. They are about a paragraph each. They are basically after the formation of the band and their solidification and before the end of the story. Seemed like a montage to me. Whenever I hear the word "montage" I think of Rocky and him training to whatever the hot song off the soundtrack is. He's broken through whatever personal barrier he faced in terms of his training and the montage shows the audience that he is basically going to go off on Clubber Lang or Drago or Apollo. So comparing that to the Roddy Doyle one, it seemed like it just showed the viewer the finished product, so to speak, before the conclusion. The Commitments rehearsing / playing to full clubs successfully or Rocky pounding the frozen beef to Bill Conti.
Is Phineas and Ferb not the greatest freaking thing ever?
That American Beauty clip isn't an actual montage, though. It's clips of the movie that we know are significant character reactions because we've all seen the goddamn movie. Outside of context, those clips mean nothing. There just some pretty pictures, and we could guess at what they mean but they would still mean nothing without a narrative to them.
As far as I know the idea of a montage can only really work in the cinematic medium. It's just a tool, and a crude one at that, though deftly effective. Like the montage musical number suggests, it's a tool for a) showing the passage of time b) showing that gradual character growth by having the dude finally run up a flight of stairs and not be winded or whatever c) (oddly the most common and less visible use) establishing some visual recognition to a large cast of characters.
If you tried to employ such a technique in prose fiction you'd be suggesting using a shortcut for pretty much all the things that make up fiction.
You don't need to show time passing in fiction, that happens off the page. You go from the end of one event to the beginning of a new event and it turns out a bunch of time happened in between. You show this by starting a new chapter, or whatever. A hash mark. If you really need a montage effect, you could write the line, "Time passes." Probably with an ellipsis in there too to really get the point across.
Showing character growth is what all of narration is for. Somewhere toward the end we read a particular line a certain way and suddenly we realize all the bullshit that this character has overcome.
Establishing a large cast, you establish a character as per usual, the moment you drop a character into a story they have to be established. You want to know how to handle a large cast, read some Stephen King. That's why his book go on for fucking ever.
Replicating a montage in prose, you wouldn't even be able to use full sentences. It would just be a series of images. Boy meets girl as kids. Older now, they get married. They get a nice house. Bitch dies. Dude's old and miserable. That was exposition, now here's a house on some balloons.
As soon as someone says montage, I can't help but think of Baywatch. They had an epic love for running along the beach and flashbacks to the setting of a cheesy song.
