Soviet Montage

(1924-1930)

Soviet Montage

According to Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia

It is the art and technique of motion-picture editing in which contrasting shots or sequences are used to effect emotional or intellectual responses.

Soviet Montage

Marxist film theory:

“Montage. . . as a collision of elements. . . Imitated the Marxist concept of the dialectic materialism.. . ‘intellectual cinema’ attempts not to tell a story but to convey abstract ideas, as a political tract might”

Marxist film theory critiques the Hollywood narrative.

Soviet Montage

The Soviet Montage movement began in 1924 and ended at 1930. During the

Montage movement's existence, perhaps fewer than thirty films were

made in the style.

In 1917 there have been two revolutions in Russia. The February Revolution eliminated the Tsar's government. The second revolution took place in October. Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the revolution and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was created. Narkompros, founded in 1918, controlled the film industry.

Soviet Montage

Narkompros established the State Film School in 1919. A year later Lev Kuleshov joined the State Film School and formed workshops. Kuleshov's experiments were showing how important editing is and he developed the central idea to the Montage theory and style.

Soviet Montage

Lenin saw cinema as the most important art, most probably because it is an effective medium for propaganda

and education.

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Kuleshov effect

Soviet filmmakers saw editing as the foundation of film art and therefore used the shot, not the scene, as the primary unit of film language and meaning. Influenced by D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the Lev Kuleshov Workshops.

Kuleshov effect

The Kuleshov Effect is a well-documented concept in film-making, discovered by Soviet film editor Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s. Kuleshov put a film together, showing the expression of an actor, edited together with a plate of soup, a dead woman, and a woman on a recliner.

Montage editing can be seen as an alternative to CONTINUITY EDITING (or the classical Hollywood style). Continuity editing strives to make the editing invisible; done well, as in most Hollywood movies, the audience is barely aware of camera movement or cuts .

Kuleshov effect

Continuity Editing vs Montage

• Smooth transition between two shots

• Seamless, Setting takes precedence, staged and worked upon arrangement

• A group of editing techniques and strategies used for a more market friendly product.

• Privileged Look

• Clash of one image against the other

• Hurried, urgent, Action takes precedence

• Sees continuity as a distancing device and gives way for a democratic interplay between shots, geared towards and intellectual and emotional response

• Urgent feel

Sergei esenstein

Sergei Eisenstein is a father of the montage of attractions. In 1923 he explain in his essay that: An attraction is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole. These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion.

Sergei esenstein

In 1929 in his essay ‘Beyond the Shot’ Eisenstein explained his theory of montage of attraction by comparing a montage to Japanese hieroglyphs. He pointed that two symbols put together make a new meaning. The combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is regarded not as their sum total but as their product, i.e. as a value of another dimension, another degree: each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept. The combination of two ‘representable’ object achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.

Sergei esenstein

• Film constructed as a series of colliding shocks or “attractions”.

• Montage as a dialectical process (from Hegel: thesis vs. antithesis = synthesis)

• Meaning created by juxtaposition of shots, not the content of individual images.

• Shocks created for ideological purpose.

Sergei esenstein

• Eye + Water = Weep• Ear + Next Door = Listen• Mouth + Bird = Sing

Methods of Montage

Metric Montage

Rhythmic Montage

Tonal Montage

Overtonal Montage

Intellectual Montage

Methods of Montage

Metric Montage:

The basic criterion is the absolute length of the shots. The shots are joined together according to their lengths in formula-scheme. This is realized in the repetition of these formulas.Mechanical acceleration increases a tension. Lengths of shots are shorter and repeated.

Methods of Montage

Rhythmic Montage:

• It includes cutting based on continuity, creating visual continuity from edit to edit.

• It is a special variant of metric montage. In this category the length of the shot depends of the content. The content determines the length. The lengths is flexible. 

Methods of Montage

Tonal Montage:

a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots — not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics — to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation.

Methods of Montage

Overtonal Montage:

The overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.

Methods of Montage

Intellectual Montage:

Intellectual Montage as a montage of overtones of an intellectual order. It is about conflict between intellectual effects. Combination of shots give us an abstract image and there is no need to explain it. 

This is the conscious creation of new ideas when two shots or images are cut together to form a new idea or object.

Sergei eisenstein

• Strike (1924)

• Battleship Potemkin (1925)

• October (1927)

• The General Line (1928)

Dziga vertov

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

“Art is not a mirror which reflects the historical struggle, but a weapon of that struggle”

(Dziga Vertov)

vsevolod pudovkin

• Mother (1926)

• The End of St. Petersburg (1927)

Results & Methods

The dramatic impact of Soviet Montage broke all the rules of the smooth, invisible editing of   the Classical Hollywood Style.

 Individual heroes are replaced by a mass of people. Violate 180 degree rule.

Heavily on the uses the close-up angle.

Do not portray negative side of the Soviet Social Reality.

Soviet montage cinema plays a pedagogic role within the perspective formation and advancement of communist ideology.

Sound and vision could be treated independently or used in concert

Film as Propoganda

All Soviet filmmakers worked under a unique set of social conditions after the Revolution of 1917.

Cinema regarded as educational tool to promote the ideals of communism

Overtly political films: images used to illustrate history in textbooks.

Limited to one basic storyline: triumph of the people over bourgeois oppression.