FTVMS 101 - Notes - Week 4 Lectures 1 and 2

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Soviet Montage

Lecturer: Jo Smith

Lecture Outline

Film and the Soviet scene

Key figures: Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov and Eisenstein

Montage versus Continuity Editing

Case Study: Battleship Potemkin

1. Film and the Soviet scene

• 1917 (2 revolutions)

• 3 periods Post-revolution era of cinema:

a) War Communism (1918-1920)
b) New Economic Policy (1921-1924)
c) Montage movt (1925-1933)

2. Key Figures

2.1       Lev Kuleshov b. 1899 d. 1970

• State School on Cinema Arts

• the Kuleshov effect

Kuleshov’s key insight: The actual content of an individual shot is not as important as how viewers interpret it because of the surrounding shots

See: www.10pm.org for sonic effect test

• Kuleshov’s insight forms the basis of Soviet Montage

2.2       Vsevolod Pudovkin b. 1893 d. 1953

• close association with Lev Kuleshov

• “Pudovkin’s films resemble a song, Eisenstein’s a scream” (French critic Leon Moussinac)

Pudovkin’s key film: Mother (1926)

2.3 Dziga Vertov (Dennis Arkadievitch Kaufman) b.1896 d. 1954

• documentary as revolutionary form

• Kino Eye Theory

Key film: Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

2.4 Sergei Eisenstein b. 1898 d. 1948
• duty of artist to forge a new life for his country

• Strike (1925) initiates the Montage Movt.

• Battleship Potemkin (1925) considered “one of the greatest motion pictures ever made” by Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick

• October (1927)

These early films use the masses as the main protagonist

Brief summary:

The Kuleshov effect

Pudovkin: linkages

Vertov: kino-eye

Eisenstein: clash/shock/juxtaposition

Common aim: revolutionary consciousness

Clip: Art That Shook the World

3. Montage versus Continuity Editing

Continuity editing: a system of cutting that maintains continuous and clear narrative action (matching screen direction, position and temporal relations from shot to shot)

Montage (aka discontinuity editing or intellectual montage):

Emphasises dynamic, often discontinuous relationships between shots and the juxtaposition of images to create ideas not present in either one by itself

• The first editing system emerges from the centre of Western capitalism, the other is from a Marxist society

• Battleship’s international success=a new way of looking at Hollywood’s own product (there is more than one type of cinema)  

Eisenstein’s montage

• an audience-based theory/practice of cinema designed to illicit affect, emotion and intellectual work

• the clash/collision of opposites prompt the audience to intellectual work and active engagement

• Eisenstein believed that if he got the technique right, he could produce a material response in the audience