The Soviet
film-makers of the 1920s reflect the ideology (the values and
beliefs) and politics of the society in which they were produced. The
early 1920s marked the end of the civil unrest, the causes of which
lay in the great divide that separated the wealthy land-owning
Russian from the peasant and the workers. (Nelmes, 2003) 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. (Trischak,
1998) 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. (Rock, n.d.)
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. (Rock, n.d.) 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.
List of directors
1) Lev Kuleshov
(extracted from IMDb)
- Born on 1899 in Russia.
- Innovator of the "Kuleshov Effect" editing.
- Directed:
- Proekt inzhenera Prayta (1918)
- Luch smerti (1925)
- Horizon (1932)
- Dokunda (1934)
- My s Urala (1943)
2) Vsevolod
Pudovkin (extracted from IMDb)
- Born on 1893 in Russia.
- His personal quote is "Editing is the Foundation of film art".
- Directed:
- Hunger...Hunger..Hunger (documentary) (1921)
- Chess Fever (short film) (1925)
- Mother (1926)
- Mechanics of the Brain (documentary) (1926)
- The End of St. Petersburg (1927)
- Storm Over Asia (1927)
- Life Is Beautiful (1928)
- Deserter (1933)
- Mother and Sons (1938)
- Minin i Pozharskiy (1939)
- Kino za XX lwt (1940)
3) Sergei Eisenstein (extracted from IMDb)
- Born on 1898 in Russia.
- known as the Father of Cinematic Montage.
- Directed:
- Strike (1925)
- Battleship Potemkin (1925)
- Old and New (1929)
- Thunder Over Mexico (1933)
- Spaniard and Indian (1941)
- Land of Freedom (1941)
- Idol of Hope (1941)
- Ivan, the Terrible Part 1 (1944) and Part 2 (1958)
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. The Kuleshov
effect is using the Pavlovian physiology to manipulate the impression
made by an image and thus spin the viewer's perception of that image.
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. (Rock, n.d.)
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. (Nelmes, 2003) 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.
The Mother by
Vsevolod Pudovkin
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. (Rock, n.d.) 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.
(Rock, n.d.) 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.
Battleship Potemkin
by Sergei Eisenstein
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 slaughterhouse). It is the audience
that create meaning from the juxtaposition of the shots.
Strike by Sergei
Eisenstein
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. So how does the movement
reflects in the contemporary film will be further discussed in the
other entry of this blog.
References:
Lev Kuleshov.
(n.d.). Retrieved April 6, 2012,
from http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0474487/
Lev Kuleshov
Experiment. (n.d.). Lights Online Film School. Retrieved March 4,
2012, from
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
(3rd 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
Sergei M.
Eisenstein. (n.d.). Retrieved April 6, 2012,
from http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001178/
http://www.digitalfilmarchive.net/clda/moving_image_arts/film_lesson_plans/SovietMontage.pdf.pdf
Trischak, E. (1998).
Soviet Montage. Retrieved March 4, 2012, from http://cinetext.philo.at
/reports/sv.html
/reports/sv.html
Vsevolod Pudovkin.
(n.d.). Retrieved April 6, 2012, from
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0699877/
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