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Neupert (2004) defines montage as 'the principle governing the organization of film elements, both visual and audio, or the combination of these elements by juxtaposing them, connecting them and/or controlling their duration. Whilst montage can involve arranging elements in a clear narrative structure, 'spatial montage' is slightly different.
The term 'spatial montage' usually refers to instances in which elements have been juxtaposed or connected in a spatial sense. For example, two elements may be positioned right next to each other on a computer screen.This can be thought of as the simplect case of spatial montage. In general, spatial montage could involve a number of images, potentially of different sizes and proportions, appearing on screen at the same time. This juxtaposition alone does not create montage; rather it is up to th filmmaker to construct a logic that determines which images appear together, when they appear, and what kind of relationship they enter into with once ohter (Manovich, 2004).
This form of editing is very liberating and allows greater possibilites. Neupert (2004) declares that 'the development of editing had a primary aesthetic effect of liberating the camera, which until then had been fixed for static takes'.
Furthermore, Montage can be genuinely creative and convey to us something that cannot be seen on any of the images themselves. A 'productive montage' is the result of an association of two images that when related to one another, cause the viewer to percieve an idea, emotion, or sentiment in his or her conciousness that is not present in the individual images (Neupert, 2004).
(For EXAMPLE...)
Overall in contrast to cinema's sequential narrative, all 'shots' in spatial narrative are accessible to the viewer at once. Like animation, spatial narrative did not diminish entirely in the twentieth century. Rather it was delegated to a minor form of Western culture- comics (Manovich, 20024).
So have we actually seen spatial montage in film? Whilst twentieth film has used techniques of montage in which different images replace each other in time, the 'spatial montage' itself of simultaneously coexisiting images has not yet been technically explored. Traditional film and video technology was designed to fill a screen completely with a single image; thus to explore spatial montage a filmmaker had to work "against" the technology (Manovich, 2004). Now with the advances in computer technology and the capability of HTML, we are easily able to create frames within frames.
Manovich (2004) states that 'in spatial montage, nothing needs to be forgotten, nothing is erased'. If we truly are becoming a generation that needs everything at once, then surely this is the way of the future?
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