Historical background of the movement | Film list | Directors

In reference to Wikipedia, soviet montage theory is an approach to understand and create cinema that relies heavily upon editing. The Soviet Montage movement began in 1924 and ended at 1930. During the existence of the montage movement's, fewer than thirty films in the style were made. But the films were very influential. In the aftermath of the 1917 October revolution, the new Russian communist government was interested in encouraging the development of a strong national film industry. The Soviet film-makers were part of an artistic avant-garde committed to innovation and experimentation and creation of new artistic practices. But the film-makers were too poor to afford cameras and film stock to shoot new films. Instead, they began to experiment with editing old films. They took old footage from pre-revolutionary Russian melodramas and a few rare Hollywood imports and re-cut them and spliced them together in innovative ways.

But the Soviet film-makers achieved a moment of true epiphany when someone smuggled a print of Hollywood pioneer, D. W. Griffiths’s 1916 film “Intolerance” into the country. The pattern of editing established by D.W. Griffith in his films taught the film-makers how different shots sizes and camera angles could be combined together in the editing suite with powerful narrative force. The Soviet film-makers wished to harness the power of cinema as a tool of education and propaganda and they therefore wished to go much further than simply entertaining audiences with spectacle and historical romance. This “montage” cinema which demanded that audiences continually searched for the meanings created by juxtaposition (two different shots joined together to make a contrast) of two shots can thus be seen as an alternative to the continuity editing-based Hollywood cinema. One of the Soviet film-makers who developed this idea into both a theory and a practice of film-making was Sergei Eisenstein.

When Lev Kuleshov created his famous film experiment (which showed his ability to alter the audience’s perception of reality with perceived “cause and effect” rules), it prompted many of his students to begin developing “montage theory,” or the theory that images could be combined together in ways that could create new meanings that weren’t inherent to the images themselves. Kuleshov's experiments were showing how important editing is and he developed the central idea to the montage theory and style. A central aspect of his experiments was that the viewer's response in cinema was less dependent on the individual shot than on the editing or montage.

Directors, V.I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein were part of the formalist tradition in film history.Vsevolod Pudovkin was one of the most influential montage theorists and film-makers in Russia. He believes that the power of the cinema comes from editing. In the 1920s when the Soviet government can afford to purchase some film equipments and film stock, he began to create some very interesting and provocative films using his theories about montage. Taking cues from his mentor Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin believed that film actors don’t really act. Rather, it’s the context the actors are in that creates emotional and intellectual meaning. This context is established through montage by showing the relationship of the actor to exterior objects. For instance, his 1926 film “Mother” which is about factory workers who try to form a union to protest unfair working conditions in the time period just before the first Russian revolution. The factory owners and policemen who oppress the workers wear sinister-looking leather gloves. Pudovkin cuts between images of these oppressive men and close-ups of their tightly clenched fists, evoking a symbolic parallel suggesting brutality and militancy.

There are differences in the specific way each director thought editing should be used. Pudovkin did not agree with Eisenstein’s system of montage, which created “jolts” between cuts. Instead, Pudovkin believed in greater impact could be made by linking shots in a constructive way. His theory of montage is called “linkage editing”. In linkage editing, individual shots are used to build up scenes. The shots are not in collision with each other, but are used as fragments or parts of a whole scene. For instance, Pudovkin often cut between two images to suggest a symbolic link or connection between them. By seeing these two images side by side, the film-maker encourages you to figure out that there is a psychological relationship between the two shots. The two shots combine together to create a new idea. Pudovkin made extensive use of devices such as “intellectual montage” in The Mother and The End of St Petersburg.

Sergei Eisenstein shared Pudovkin’s commitment to the revolution and to the communist ideals of the new Russian government. Both of their films had themes exploring social conflict and the oppression or redemption of the Russian lower class. But whereas Pudovkin’s use of montage was intended to enhance the dramatic narrative, Eisenstein wanted to interrupt the narrative with clashing ideas. Unlike Pudovkin, he felt that the continuity between shots should not proceed smoothly. Instead, he thought they should be shocking, sharp, jolting, and even violent because the dynamics of montage serve as impulses driving forward the total film. He believed that shot A (the thesis) could be juxtaposed with shot B (the anti-thesis, a shot that would have been diametrically opposed to the first shot). The clash of thesis and anti-thesis could result in synthesis, the creation of an entirely new meaning out of the clash of these two opposing ideas. In Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, there is one of the most famous and influential sequences in cinema history typically referred to as The Odessa Steps sequence. To him, conflict was created by the juxtaposition of shots of high visual contrast. The central scene of the film, consisting of parallel lines of soldiers marching down the steps leading to the harbour systematically shooting the onlookers, provides a vivid example of the effectiveness of Eisenstein’s montage technique. The effect is to heighten the horrific nature of slaughter as well as to hold the audience in suspense. The furious and shocking climax to the scene demonstrates how he is able to use montage to manipulate audience expectations and to shock with violent juxtapositions and graphic images.

Directional continuity is also disrupted. A shot of the crowd fleeing towards the left of the screen is followed by an image of the crowd fleeing in the opposite direction. Similar shot composition also creates visual dissonance and disunity. Another way that Eisenstein differed from Pudovkin is that Pudovkin's juxtaposed images were organic to the context of the film. Eisenstein felt that films could include images that were thematically or metaphorically relevant, regardless of whether they could be found in the location of the film or not. For example, in Eisenstein’s first film “Strike”, which was made in 1924, he spliced together images of workmen being shot down by machine guns with images of bull being slaughtered. The oxen were not literally on the location where the story takes place. The image was spliced in for metaphorical purposes, similar to how literature might make a figurative comparison. The formula mentioned earlier can be applied here: shot A (massacre of the workers) + shot B (bull being slaughtered) = new meaning C (that the workers are being killed cold-bloodedly like animals in a slaughterehouse). It is the audience that create meaning from the juxtaposition of the shots.

The dramatic impact of Soviet Montage broke all the rules of the smooth, invisible editing of the Classical Hollywood Style. A style of film-making that evolved to immerse the audience in a story and disguise technique was turned upside down in order to create the opposite emotional effect and to bring the audience to the edge of their seat. The time-bending techniques of Soviet Montage pushed the cinema beyond the realism of Hollywood into new psychological territory.

References:

Lev Kuleshov Experiment. (n.d.). Lights Online Film School. Retrieved March 4, 2012, http://www.lightsfilmschool.com/articles/lev_kuleshov/index.html

Nelmes, J. (2003). Linkage editing. An Introduction to Film Studies, 3, 396. Retrieved March 8, 2012, from

http://books.google.com.my/books?id=vb_1ma9DKH0C&pg=PA396&lpg=PA396&dq=vsevolod+pudovkin+linkage+montage&source=bl&ots=0kCc3G1rsB&sig=AODIBPXIEyRZs_6RXYMPAs33tzk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=d3xYT9LXN43MrQez5KjUDg&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=vsevolod%20pudovkin%20linkage%20montage&f=false

Nelmes, J. (2003) The Soviet Montage Cinema of the 1920s. In An Introduction To Film Studies (3^rd ed.,pp. 390-417) New York: Routledge.

Rock, A. (n.d.). The Development of Soviet Montage. Retrieved March 4, 2012, from

http://medb.byu.edu/files/lesson/TheDevelopmentofSovietMontage.pdf

Soviet Montage. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2012, from

http://www.digitalfilmarchive.net/clda/moving_image_arts/film_lesson_plans/SovietMontage.pdf.pdf

Soviet montage theory. (2012). Wikipedia. Retrieved March 8, 2012, from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory

Trischak, E. (1999). Soviet Montage. Retrieved March 4, 2012, from

http://cinetext.philo.at/reports/sv.html