![]() ![]() (Nevermind that the movie is wildly inaccurate, historically speaking.) Shots of a grieving mother juxtaposed with images of bayonet wielding troops result in a surprisingly visceral feeling of injustice. There is no way to come away from this movie and not feel like the Czarists are anything but murderous villains. You can watch it below.Īs you can see, it’s a powerful piece of propaganda. In it, Czarist soldiers massacre a group of protestors, mostly women and children. Eisenstein saw it “as an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.” An intellectual well versed in theory, Eisenstein compared montage to Karl Marx’s vision of history where a thesis smashes into its antithesis and together, from that wreckage, forms its synthesis.Įisenstein’s greatest example of montage, and indeed one of the greatest examples of filmmaking ever, is the Odessa Steps scene from his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. One of Kuleshov’s students, Vsevolod Pudovkin envisioned each shot as a brick, one small part that together with other small parts created a cinematic edifice.Īnother student, Sergei Eisenstein, proposed a far more dynamic, and revolutionary, form of montage. Using the French word for assemble, Kuleshov called this “montage.” At the school, however, there was considerable debate over what montage exactly was. This realization would forever be commemorated in film schools everywhere as the Kuleshov Effect. The connection between the two images was made entirely within the head of the viewer. Invariably, audiences praised the actor for his subtlety of performance. But it was the filmmakers in the newly formed Soviet Union that really contributed a new way of thinking about film – Soviet Montage. ![]() French filmmakers like René Clair used camera tricks and odd framing to create works of formal beauty. Murnau and Robert Wiene experimented with cinematic depictions of the subconscious. Yet just as these rules were being codified, filmmakers, mostly European, looked for other ways to tell a story. This form of storytelling was so successful, and profitable, that it has been used for just about every Hollywood movie that has come out since. By the time Griffith released his hugely influential (and hugely racist) masterwork A Birth of A Nation in 1915, the rules of continuity editing had more or less been worked out. Using such tools as matching eyelines – cutting so that the actors appear to be looking at each other across different shots – and the 180-degree rule – which keeps the actors from switching places on the screen – Griffith and his cohorts created a visual grammar that let audiences forget the film’s artifice and disappear into the story. Over that time, he, along with his fellow Hollywood directors, developed continuity editing. Collectively, the directors utilizing montage theory were able to explore how time and space can be presented on film, exploring how audiences may respond to various montage techniques.Īlthough montage is generally used in less radical ways in modern cinema, Kulshov’s theory has undeniably become a common tool for filmmakers worldwide, and films such as Battleship Potemkin and The Man With a Movie Camera are still celebrated as some of the most groundbreaking films of all time.Between 19, American filmmaker D. ![]() He inspired filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein ( Battleship Potemkin), who was formerly a student of Kulshov, and Dsiga Werov ( The Man With a Movie Camera). Kulshov’s theory asked questions as to how editing and composition influences a viewer’s interpretation of a sequence. In this way, Kulshov was applying tools more commonly associated with literature and language, forming sequences as you would a sentence rather than composing a scene as if it were a live theatrical production. To prove his point, the filmmaker cut together various images, each of which changed the audience's reading: The same facial expression, applied to different situations, will be interpreted entirely differently by the audience depending on its collective context. The audience are able to view two separate images and subconsciously give them a collective context. This would become known as the Kuleshov Effect. Director Lev Kulshov first conceptualised montage theory on the basis that one frame may not be enough to convey an idea or an emotion. Just like French Impressionist cinema, Soviet Montage came from the concept that film theory doesn't necessary have to align with theatrical frameworks, as the filmmaking process provides an entirely new set of tools. ![]()
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