What I have done in the past one week.

In the last week, I changed my research title to “How post-production create surrealism film”, but it was denied by my tutor, because I classify my favourate kind of film to surrealism films, actually they were not. They may contain some surrealism characteristics, but the plot and the montage were not a real surrealism film.

For better understanding of surrealism movies，I have watched some surrealism features film such as the famous film director Germaine Dulac ”The Seashell and the Clergrman”. This film is mainly about the character’s anxiety of sex, but he faced many obstacles to achieve sex. And Dulac set up the sequence that is the constantly damaged glass bottles to explain the gloomy emotion of the man. This film includes no plot, dialogue, but relies on visual to show director’s thought.

From watching this film, I realised that, a good film is not only dependent on dialogue and words to delivery information, visual language is also an important part of film. Even only using visual language, fantastic films can be produced as well. Due to this idea, I have read a book named “Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication” by Ann Marie Barry.

In this book, she mentioned the Dialectical Montage theory by a famous director Sergei Eisenstein, It was, connecting two visual opposing sequences together helps the film in create the conflict and perceptual tension, and this theory will stretch the meaning of frame itself. To understand it easily, I watched his representative work “Battleship Potemkin”. The famous montage sequence in this film is “Odessa steps”.  Crowds of people walk down the stairs, a mother witness her child was killed, and all of the people stepped on the child, the mother was terrified and despaired.

The 7 minutes shot was divided into 155 cuts. Only a few seconds distance, the mother steps to her baby, the film back to the mother's face 5 times, to make the cutting speedily. It creates the perceptual tension of audiences. Therefore, from this sequence, it confirms the significant of visual language in film, because there is no words, no dialogue, but only using the montage technique to express Eisenstein’s thoughts. So, I come up with my final project, that is “How montage create the visual language to manipulate viewers’ perception?”.