Film Makers of Soviet Montage (Part 1)

The Roots of Soviet Montage

The new Communist government was interested in encouraging the development of a strong national film industry. But many of the early Soviet filmmakers 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.

But these Soviet filmmakers achieved a moment of true epiphany when someone smuggled a print of D. W. Griffiths’s 1916 film Intolerance into the country. Under the tutelage of Lev Kuleshov, a group of film students studied the film and its editing techniques in detail. After a while, they started to experiment with re-editing the film and discovered that they could radically change the meaning or feeling of the film just by editing it differently.

When Lev Kuleshov created his famous film experiment (which we discussed earlier in class today), 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.

History of Soviet Montage

The Soviet Montage movement began in 1924/25 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.

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