FSM # 5: The film/music montage…
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You all probably know that Sergei Eisenstein was a pioneer in the realm of montages. As Andre Bazin pointed out, Eisenstein was among the filmmakers who believed in the power of the image rather than trying to nail “reality” onscreen. His montages had political and meta-fictional agendas.
Hollywood adopted the montage technique early on as an effort to compress time and space within motivational boundaries (someone building a house or travelling across a continent).
Music has been an important part of these montages – Hollywood and elsewhere – and one of the few times besides the credits that it is really allowed front seat with few or no sound effects.
A montage that immediately comes to mind is the “forray into luxury”-sequence from De Palma’s SCARFACE. Moroder’s 80’s synth grooves connote “High Life” and a yuppie mentality, and have a delightful effect. Plus the music is mixed loudly with no sound effects.
What are some of your examples of good film/music montages, and why do you think they’re so good?
(I should add that, 13 years after I made the above post on FSM, I did a podcast special on montages in film music. It’s in Norwegian, but you can click ‘playlist’ and see some of my favourites there.)
I suppose it greatly depends on how you define “Montage”, obviously, just about every every movie (except perhaps Hitchcock’s ROPE or Sam Mendes’ 1917) is an edited montage made up of different scenes. Now I’m not saying every edited scene is automatically a “Montage” (or you wouldn’t need the term separate from simply “editing”), but the thing is that not everyone defines what a Montage in a movie is the same.
Back in the day, what Eisenstein pioneered was the idea that seemingly unrelated scenes and images can be edited together to create the impression of something else. However, this concept, as you point out, has basically become one of the “basics” of film making, and to differentiate what some may view a “Montage” as what others might see as mere “editing” are fluent to say the least.
I think the training scenes in the ROCKY movies are often perfect examples of elaborate montages that fuse into one scene.
Like, for example, this slick 80s Montage from ROCKY 4 with the pulsating synthesizer driven music. It’s a perfect “Montage” in the sense that the edited scenes don’t have a clear continuity, nor are they scenes from the same time or space, but could have happened at various different times before the fight, yet they fuse into one kinetic and very effectively edited Montage.Yup, that’s a classic. Whenever I do lectures on film music for young ‘uns, and talk about montage sequences, I often use the spoof montage from TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE to lighten things up, which obviously nods to that one from ROCKY IV, as as well as others from the period. I might then follow with the aforementioned SCARFACE montage as a “proper” one.
The classic training montages. Probably you could throw in some Van Damme here, too.
For some reason I currently just remember some random ones although I should and do clearly know more:
“The Ecstasy of Gold” from THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY:
The opening of UP which is just music only (Sorry, Thor, Giacchino, but one of his best scores ;-)):
The construction scene from EXPLORERS with Goldsmith’s music (IMHO best track of the score…):
(Which reminds me of the current construction scenes of THE A-TEAM somehow ;-))
I am not a huge Kamen fan. But I love the music to that montage scene from Highlander.
And another good Montage score from Giacchino.
And by the way, Highlander has a second great montage scene.
Some good examples! Would be neat to know WHY you think they work so well, in words. That was also a goal of that 2003 post.
Right. Often are these tracks highlights of the soundtrack album, because they allow the composer to write two to three minutes of evolving music in one go rising or keeping a certain, usually optimistic, mood.
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