Sightlines · a concept

montage quantitative french

the whole as the greatest quantity of movement; the mathematical sublime.

On screen: maximal fluid mobility, superimposition, machines/water

  • J'Accuse (1919) — Sequences built by shortening: shots of six frames, then four, then two, cut against each other 'until the image becomes rhythm rather than description,' applied to combat, to Jean Diaz's collapse…
  • La Roue (1923) — Montage rapide developed with Marguerite Beaugé: shot lengths contracting toward single frames on the runaway engine, organized around measure, accelerando and refrain rather than dialectical…
  • Napoleon (1927) — Rapid rhythmic cutting, dense superimposition and multiple-exposure work pursued as 'ecstatic intensification rather than dialectical argument'; the double-storm's piled-up motion of sea, boat and…
  • Limite (1931) — The film's density of in-camera superimposition, dissolves, and fluid mobility over water, inherited from Epstein's multi-exposure harbor montage and Dulac's optically superimposed interior states.
  • Stray Dog (1949) — The market montage is "built from layered dissolves and superimpositions of the teeming, ravaged city" — the French school's maximal-mobility superimposition technique repurposed for documentary…
  • Dog Star Man: Part IV (1964) — Four rolls running simultaneously so every element is figure and ground at once; the direct debt to Ballet Mécanique's prismatic lens attachments and cutting governed by descending frame counts
  • A Man and a Woman (1966) — Whole passages abandon scene-by-scene construction for montage governed by Lai's music — shots of unequal length assembled for cadence rather than continuity — over a track of engines, wind, surf and…
  • Stolen Kisses (1968) — The pneumatique sequence: Truffaut follows the *petit bleu* down the chutes and through the compressed-air machinery under Paris in near-documentary fashion — pure fluid mobility, machines and…
  • The Getaway (1972) — The prison montage's fragmented, repetitive, overlapping images of machinery, built on accelerating mechanical rhythm rather than narrative continuity.
  • Koyaanisqatsi (1983) — Maximal fluid mobility of machines and water edited to the rhythmic phrasing of Glass's score, in the lineage of Honegger/Pacific 231.
  • The City of Lost Children (1995) — the single-teardrop Rube Goldberg chain across town — water, machinery, maximal fluid movement, each cut a gear-tooth, joined by early digital compositing
  • Moulin Rouge! (2001) — Jill Bilcock's cutting on beat and accent in "Zidler's Rap"/"Lady Marmalade" and "The Can-Can," reducing action to a strobe of very short shots so that rhythm, not spatial continuity, governs the cut.
  • Transformers (2007) — Maximal quantity of movement: restless crane and dolly work plus "multiple simultaneous vectors of motion — camera movement, subject movement, and internal transformation of the robots — within very…
  • Baby Driver (2017) — Pre-scored, fixed musical durations mean Machliss and Amos cut on the beat — the edit timed to the bar, not the drama: Deleuze's French rhythmic conception of montage as a numerical/musical value…
  • Weathering with You (2019) — The RADWIMPS song-montages as structural units — rapid cutting compressing time and interiority over rain, rail lines, and city machinery, with the fluid mobility of the virtual camera at a maximum.
  • Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) — The whole production organized around maximal fluid mobility — Wētā's rebuilt water simulation and the reef staging — placing Cameron in the French school's line of extracting the maximum quantity of…
  • Elvis (2022) — Villa and Redmond's continuous-propulsion cutting: rapid intercutting of performance with the machinery that turns it into product — posters, ledgers, contracts, spinning newspapers — plus split…