Haiku as Montage

I chose to make a video that attempts to demonstrate Eisenstein's theory of the montage as a haiku. His theories define montage as a method that primarily derives its meaning from the conflict between sequential shots. He asserts that the Japanese haiku was the first form of montage because it layers sequential images to create a greater association through their collision. I thought it would be interesting to apply this part of his theory literally and to create a short film that imitated a specific haiku. The haiku I used is from Basho:

Sad beauty?
The morning glory—
even when it's badly painted.


I interpreted these lines separately through three different shots of generally still images (though some motion takes place within the fixed shot) and experimented with different ways to fuse them. My first instinct was to make the dissolves between them especially long so as to emphasize the conflict and collision effect that Eisenstein discussed. I also found it effective to make each shot shorter so as to emulate the spontaneity and speed of the association one makes in the mind or “inner speech” language Eisenstein referenced.
I decided to show the sequence of images two different times so as to compare the effects of two different approaches. In the first, I placed the entire haiku together and as separate from the entire film haiku so that both the haiku and its film version can be seen in their own completions. In the latter I interspersed the lines of the haiku with their correlating images so as to tie each image with its corresponding line more explicitly and thus give more meaning to the experience of the haiku.
One of the most difficult things about creating the film was to find images that were connected, yet also demonstrated Eisenstein's theory of conflict in their relationship to each other. I decided that the best way to connect images would be through a narrative. My hope is that the shots I chose can act as dots that can be connected in different ways by the audience, and that because of the ambiguity, the audience can use its imagination to connect the conflicting images and become co-creators of the meaning of the film.
I wanted the conflict to come through in the composition, so I used an extreme close-up for the first shot, and a long shot for the second, and a close-up for the third. The colors of the shots added to each shot separately, but in relationship to each other, was distracting from their connectivity. I included a black and white version (“take 1”) to emphasize the connectedness of the images and allow them to properly collide with each other in composition and content, without the complications of color or titles. In the version with the titles interspersed (“take 2”), I left the color in the footage and made the shots shorter so as to evoke the spontaneity of associations that occur in the mental process and better imitate its fragmented nature.