A while back I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel that featured people with extraordinary abilities, almost superpowers. One of these individuals was an artist named Esref Armagan. Check out some of his works:
You may look at these and say, "They're okay," because that's probably what I would say if I didn't know that Esref was born blind. In fact, he was born without eyes. Check out more of his work at his website: armagan.com/paintings.asp, or check out the actual part of the television show I caught here: youtube.com/watch?v=L3AgO6H0H98.
The reason I chose these two paintings was because of Esref's use of perspective. Perspective is such a simple idea: real life is 3D, so why not try as hard as we can to draw it in 3D, right? Quick: think of every Egyptian painting you've ever seen. Not so 3D, huh.
While I learned about Esref's amazing ability, I also learned that the use of linear perspective in art wasn't truly 'discovered' until 1425 when an artist named Brunelleschi used geometry (chalk another one up for math) to develop this new way of drawing real objects to appear in 3 dimensions.
I remember that was one of those, "They had to discover that?" moments for me. Another came when talking about another art form, one that I've been closely studying for the past 2 years: film.
The montage is an element of film that you see on a regular basis in television and movies. If edited well a montage of images or clips can tell you exactly what's going on as well as how to feel about what's happening. The 80s provided a few well known montage examples: Tony Montana's rise to power in Scarface and Rocky's training in Rocky IV (the latter was hilariously parodied in Team America: World Police). Of course it's been seen in hundreds of other movies - just think, what would that stabbing scene in Psycho have been like without those quick cuts between the knife, Vera Miles' scream and the shower drain? Or what about the baptism scene in The Godfather?
Just like the use of perspective in paintings, montage in film had to be invented. That's where Sergei Eisenstein, the "Father of Montage", comes into play. In his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin Eisenstein first tested the use of montage and produced one of the most famous scenes in film history: the Odessa Steps (just a warning: this is some old school stuff so you may find it boring, and it gets strangely violent at the end).
I'll spare you too many details about Battleship Potemkin's story, but I wanted to share this famous scene because of the amount of filmmakers who have paid homage to it over the years: Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, and Terry Gilliam. The most recognizable (and blatantly similar) homage may be from Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (fast forward to about 4:00). An honorable mention must be made for Peter Segal's Naked Gun 33 1/3 (RIP Leslie Neilsen).
It never ceases to amaze me how art, whether it is painting or film, can be pushed further using ingenuity - and the changes that are made sometimes become so commonplace we don't even notice them. Maybe next time you see perspective in a painting or a montage in a movie you'll think, "I guess it did have to start somewhere..."
Before signing off I wanted to share my favorite montage of images from Battleship Potemkin. In one scene, the ship's crew has mutinied and decided to fire on the Tsarist headquarters in Odessa causing the people to rise up and join in their rebellion. Eisenstein brilliantly uses the following three photographs in succession to show the people's reaction:
A sleeping lion... a waking lion... and finally a rising lion. Three different statues that when pieced together give the idea of a single lion awakening, just as the Russian people awaken to stand up to their oppressors. It's as simple as it is powerful.
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