Montage In Goodfellas

Reflective Response: Eisenstein’s Montage and Goodfellas Eisenstein defines montage as a conflict between the meanings of two subsequent images that creates an entirely new meaning when viewed consecutively. For example, in his The Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein most famously meshes the shots of Russian soldiers gunning down revolutionary rioters, and a baby in a carriage falling down the steps of a building. These two images have their own entities, but viewed one after the other, their meaning is something greater: the cost of innocence – true goodness –during wartime or conflict. In this analysis, I will apply Eisenstein’s definition of montage to the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas, and how Scorsese’s use of montage – the conflict of images – conveys new or ironic meaning, and how this use redefines the context in which the conflicting images are viewed. In Goodfellas, Karen Hill is occasionally a narrator – this deviation from her husband Henry’s narration is supposed to give the audience a dose of normality into the chaos
Eisenstein mentions the importance of color in montage as “the counterpoint of the two—the retained rate of vibration against the newly perceived one yields the dynamism of our apprehension of the interplay of color”. The dissonance between light and dark shades in subsequent shots is in itself a montage. Scorsese uses heavily conflicting color palettes to exemplify the irony of mob life – in the day, the mobster can love his wife and family, and in the night, he can stab a man for looking at him wrong. The discord created by the color differences is both visually and contextually upsetting; we are introduced into a bright world of family intimacy and delight in which a child’s wildest birthday dream can come true, and then plunged into the murky waters of the actions that made that kind of life