Let's take a look at the Cosmic Sequences and Creation of Life on Earth from the movie Tree of Life
When I first saw this, I didn't know what was happening until it reaches around 8 minutes then I started to notice the microbiology scenes, only then I kind of knew this is the flashback montage of the Earth creation and Life on Earth.
I think our brain has an amazing power to link up scenes in movies, as well as linking up montages and quickly take a conclusion.
Here is another flashback montage from the movie Her
The scene goes with Theodore talking about his previous relationship while the montages are playing. And the scene ends with Samantha saying, "The past is just a story we tell ourselves."
On this use, the narrative is going clearer because the audience is still listening to the character. I think one of Tree of Life's main problem in the scene is that some people don't have the attention span of 15 minutes to sit in a movie without any interaction but background music and visuals, which still only make a little sense after a long time.
Her uses many mood montages and rhythmic montages which I can't share here because I couldn't find them online, but I believe the movie shows a great example of the use of montages in film form.
And I just remembered beside Memento there is one movie that goes back and forth as well, it has a lot of flashback and flash-forward montages, and it incorporates 6 parallel storyline in different timelines. Cloud Atlas is one movie that requires the audience to solve the story, and not just one story but all of them. However, only after 1.5 hours that the movie starts to get clearer for the audiences (some might even need a second watch).
There are just so many ways to narrate stories in filmmaking that we can look upon, there is no best way, so I think the explorations of film form are unlimited.
No comments:
Post a Comment