Effective Use of Montage in the Film, The Night of the Hunter
In the film The Night of the Hunter, director Charles Laughton uses montage on multiple occasions to create a variety of visual and emotional effects. Montage is used to slow time and create tension, as a foreshadowing device, and as a symbolic depiction of the film’s conflict.
Towards the end of the film, when John and Pearl Harper escape from Preacher Harry Powell via the river, montage is skillfully utilized to slow time, thus enhancing the drama of the moment. As the children scramble down the riverbank to the rowboat, the frame alternates between a high angle shot of the children by the river and a low angle shot of the Preacher on the hill. With each successive shot, the Preacher moves steadily closer to the boat, slowly building the scene to its dramatic climax and the children’s narrow escape. By alternating the shots in this montage, the entire scene takes longer to depict than if the camera merely showed a stationary long shot. This additional time amplifies the tension of the moment, making John and Pearl’s escape all the more dramatic.
As Eisenstein discusses, montage can also be employed as the combination of two unrelated images to create a third, unrelated concept, similar to Japanese writing. Laughton uses this technique in the candy shop scene, when Willa Harper is told she needs a man in her life to take care of her and the children. The shot then changes to a large, black oncoming train, with loud, bass-heavy music in the background. High contrast lighting and the dramatic music intensify the fear the train produces. These two shots alternate several times, the train coming closer each time. The combination of the unrelated images ominously foreshadows the terror and fear to come when Willa meets Preacher Harry, and he begins to lie and scheme his way into her life and secrets. Harry’s domination and control eventually lead to Willa’s murder, and John and Pearl’s desperate escape. This montage in the first half of the film establishes the fearful tone of the remainder of the film.
Laughton also uses montage to illustrate the harshness of nature and society during the children’s trip down the river, in the form of close-up shots of various animals, both predator and prey.
Mattie, Cogburn, and LaBoeuf’s journey through the Choctaw Nation is a long, gruesome one. The scene features a couple of cinematographic techniques that make it very memorable. One of these is editing. The group’s journey takes approximately ten hours, but Deakins uses time lapse cinematography to make it much shorter. The images dissolve into one another with each new image bringing them farther into the Indian Territory. This technique shows the distance the Mattie, Cogburn, and LaBoeuf travel by compressing the time. Another ...
Lastly, this film uses doubles in the final scene of the movie where the two trains cross each other. This sequence is important due to the fact that Uncle was thrown under one of the trains to his death.
...Critical Approaches to Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Home - School of Communication and Information - Rutgers University. Rutgers, n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2011.
In scene 49, a 'montage ' shows the passage of time as Ricky Baker and Hector move through the woods as Paula, officers, and hunters chase after them. Except, instead of cutting between these moments in time, the camera slowly turns 780 degrees and characters appear and disappear in parts of the forest as needed. It 's a one-take montage. It 's a clever shot and it indicates Waititi is exploring other ways of presenting montages. It 's a very noticeable stylistic choice, but it doesn 't distract from what 's happening on screen. The montage itself is similar to previous ones in the film--passages of time are shown as humorous bits. The chase through the forest is a serious one--Hector is accused of molesting Ricky Baker and if Ricky Baker is caught, he would be sent to juvenile prison. And yet, since the film 's world includes incompetent police officers and hunters, the montage is
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
Selden, Raman, and Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide To Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993.
William Faulkner overwhelms his audience with the visual perceptions that the characters experience, making the reader feel utterly attached to nature and using imagery how a human out of despair can make accusations. "If I jump off the porch I will be where the fish was, and it all cut up into a not-fish now. I can hear the bed and her face and them and I can...
Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: an Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. 365-77. Print.
April-May 1992, p. 32-4 Rpt. In Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Stanley. Vol. 97. Detroit: Gale, 1997
Patterson, R. E., Flatt, S. W., Newman, V. A., Natarajan, L., Rock, C. L., Thomson, C. A., et al. (2011). Marine Fatty Acid Intake Is Associated with Breast Cancer Prognosis. The journal of nutrition , 141 (2), 201-206.
Enhancing the sustained fright of this film are an excellent cast, from which the director coaxes extraordinary performances, and Bernard Herrmann's chilling score. Especially effective is the composer's so-called "murder music," high-pitched screeching sounds that flash across the viewer's consciousness as quickly as the killer's deadly knife. Bernard Herrmann achieved this effect by having a group of violinists frantically saw the same notes over and over again.
...esults. One interesting thing found, is that although it is though that dreams happen in a blink of an eye that they actually happen in a realistic time span (General Information). Another is that dreams generally take place in familiar settings and are random leftover thoughts from the previous day. What’s interesting though, is that during studies in which participants were woken on a regular basis, scientists found that the dreams remembered the following morning were “more coherent, sexier, and generally more interesting” than the dream descriptions that were collected in data for research. Most participants remembered very little of their dreams and only about the last fifteen minutes of dreaming before awoken.
The Mediterranean Diet is rich in vegetables, fruit, legumes such as peas and beans and also rich in grains. It also contains moderate amounts of chicken and fish. There is little red meat. Most fat is unsaturated and comes from olive oil and nuts. Since a diet is what you eat and what you drink having a small amount of red wine has been shown to increase the health benefits. In combination with moderate exercise and not smoking, the Mediterranean Diet offers a scientifically researched, balanced, and health-promoting lifestyle choice. (HealthFitnessRevolution, 2013)
...In the novel Disgrace, Lurie, the white man, seems in a sense to reflect this character because he is selfish and behaves very disrespectful towards women.
Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: From Structuralism to Eco Criticism. New Delhi: Pearson, 2010. Print.