DOWN MEMORY LANE
Film Montage

Level: Second Year Art & Design/ ESL intermediate to high-intermediate

Language Focus: Collocations in film vocabulary + reading comprehension

Design Focus Film Theory: Deleuze Time Images + Eisenstein Montage

Time: 2 classes of 2 h 40 min. (2h 15min activities + 25min. break+debrief)

Prep time: 4.5 hours

Lesson Description:

These 2 class lessons, the teacher covers concept-development techniques and research methods for students to retrieve memories as content for a video project produced in Adobe Premiere and Audition. Montage techniques and sequence serve as a platform to piece together memory trails, in relation to identity and emotions. In understanding the holistic meaning of the words CUT and SHOOT (used as both verbs and nouns in various contexts)—their inflections and derivatives—students outsource visual examples of these word-collocations from contemporary cinema and daily life imagery to expand their technical film vocabulary.

Popplet.com wordmap setup/starting point. Niberca Polo, 2016.
See samples: SHOOT and CUT.

  Yoko Ono’s Memory cups (left) and “Touch Poem #5” (right)

Lorena Cosba, “Your Hair on my Pillow…” Courtesy of the artist.

Isaac Julien “Ten Thousand Waves,” 2010

Natalia Riedle, Spring 2014 

Class 1

FOR TEACHER:

Readings:

• “Collision of Ideas.”Sergei Eisenstein
• Film Continuity & Montage: Griffith and Eisenstein
• “The Brain Is the Screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on” The Time-Image.” Gilles Deleuze and Melissa McMuhan
• The Human Memory, introductory reading 
• “The technique of film editing.” (1971), Chapter 1: pages 3-23. Karel Reisz, and Gavin Millar
• Why Teach Collocations?

Visual Aids: 

• Memory Exploration, Niberca Polo and Jessica Cannon
  
• WNYC Radio Lab clip on “Memory and Forgetting”

TEDtalk:

• “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory 
• The Complexity of Memory (series) 

FOR STUDENTS:

Readings:

• “Aberrations of Time and Movement.” OliverSacks
• Memory and Imagination (Münsterberg, Hugo, and Richard Griffith.The film: A psychological study. Courier Corporation, 2004., pages 39-56)
• “Useful Vocabulary of Film Studies” 

Handouts:

• Film vocabulary
• SLR and sound recording technical support

Worksheets:

• Memory retrieval
• Collocations + Film vocabulary
• Individual Storyboarding
• Vocabulary integration
• Director and Editor roles

Class 2

FOR TEACHER:

Readings:

• “Montage Theory in Film Studies.”Samuel R. Forkner
• “Expanded cinema, video and virtual environments.”Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film. Peter Weibel
• Video Editing techniques 

Visual Aids:

• Hitchcock short clip: Cutting/ Assembly/Montage/ Editing
• “The Cutting Edge” documentary (timecode: 55:50-1:15)

TEDtalk:

• The Future of Storytelling 
• Capturing Memory in Video Art 

FOR STUDENTS:

Readings:

• In the blink of an eye: A perspective on film editing. Walter Murch (chapter: Rule of Six and Dreaming in Pairs, pages 17-20 and 26-31)
• “Frames of Mind: Photography, memory, and identity.” Patricia Marcella Anwandter
• On Photography, Susan Sontag (Chapter 22, pages 174-178)

Handouts:

• Film Editing

Worksheets:

• Team Storyboarding