Soviet montage theory

Soviet montage theory

Before the communist revolution of 1917 the Russia film industry was very small and rely a lot on imported films from Europe. The first Russian base studio was only set up in 1908. It was only when world war one broke out when Russia films started to grow but even with no foreign competition the Russian film industry was still very underdeveloped with only three main  production studio being set up in the whole country. The reason for this was because the film industry was small due to the fact that the large Russian working class were too poor to attend the cinema. after the event of the 1917 the civil war and the soviet takeover by Lenin that follow, the film industry when through a major overhaul. Lenin saw cinema as a very important way of spending communist to a large worker population. The first group of films made during the civil war were mostly just  newsreels that were send around the country in travelling cinema to rural areas.

Soviet montage is a style of film-making that relies alot on editing. And makes extensive use of cuts, movement of the camera and changes of  the camera position, very much to set up new meanings not showed by the filmed action itself.  

Sergei Eisenstein January 23, 1898 – February 11, 1948 was a pioneering soviet Russian film .He is known well for his development in montage cross-cutting and editing skills noted in particular in his silent films  His clashes of shots were based on scale, volume, rhythm, motion (speed) as well as direction of movement within the frame, Eisenstein claimed that the new meaning that arises out of these clashes is the same phenomenon found in the course of historical events of social and revolutionary change. He favour the used of intellectual montage in his feature films such as Battleship Potemkin to portray the political situation surrounding the Bolshevik revolution .He also believed that intellectual montage expresses how everyday thought processes comes about. In this sense, the montage will in fact form thoughts in the minds of the viewer, and is thereby making montage a powerful tool for propaganda. In his film Strike, Eisenstein includes a sequence with cross-cut editing between the slaughter of a bull and police attacking workers. He then creates a film message, assaulted workers equal slaughtered bull. The result that he wished to produce was not simply to show images of people's lives in the film resulting more importantly to shock the viewer into understanding the reality of their own lives. this style of editing offers discontinuity in graphic qualities, It is not with the continuity as is found in the classical Hollywood system. It draws attention to itself because changes between shots are obvious. It is easiest to understand these as part of a range of values where, at one end, the image content matters very little, while at the other it determines everything about the choices and combinations of the edited film.

In his later writings, Eisenstein argues that montage, especially intellectual montage, is an alternative system to continuity editing. He claims that "Montage is conflict" where new ideas, appear from the crash of the montage sequence  resulting of a combination and where the new emerging ideas are not integral in any of the images of the edited sequence. A whole new concept comes into the state of existing.

Bibliography

Early soviet cinema, David Gillespie

A history of narrative film, David A. Cook|