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.

Vsevelod Pudovkin

Pudovkin’s Contribution to Montage Theory

Vsevelod Pudovkin was one of the most influential montage theorists and filmmakers in Russia at this time. In the 1920s when the Soviet government was finally able to purchase some film equipment and film stock, he began to create some very interesting and provocative films using his theories about montage.

Taking his cues from his mentor Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin believed that film actors don’t really act. Rather, it’s the context the actors are in that creates emotional and intellectual meaning. And this context is established through montage by showing the relationship of the actor to exterior objects. For example, his 1926 film Mother is about factory workers who try to form a union to protest unfair working conditions in the time period just before the first Russian revolution. The factory owners and policemen who oppress the workers wear sinister-looking leather gloves. Pudovkin cuts between images of these oppressive men and close-ups of their tightly clenched fists, evoking a symbolic parallel suggesting brutality and militancy.

His theory of montage could be called “linkage montage.” Simply put, Pudovkin often cut between two images to suggest a symbolic link or connection between them. By seeing these two images side by side, the filmmaker encourages you to figure out that there is a psychological relationship between the two shots. The two shots combine together to create a new idea.

Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein’s Contribution to Montage Theory

Sergei Eisenstein shared Pudovkin’s commitment to the revolution and to the Communist ideals of the new Russian government. Both of their films had themes exploring social conflict and the oppression/redemption of the Russian lower class. But whereas Pudovkin’s use of montage was intended to enhance the dramatic narrative, Eisenstein wanted to interrupt the narrative with clashing ideas. Unlike Pudovkin, he felt that transitions between shots should not be smooth. Rather, he thought they should be sharp, jolting, and even violent because conflict is universal to all great art. He was interested in creating a cinema of conflict.

His theory of montage could be called “collisionary montage.” He believed that shot A (the thesis) could be juxtaposed with shot B (the anti-thesis, a shot that would have been diametrically opposed to the first shot). The clash of thesis and anti-thesis could result in synthesis, the creation of an entirely new meaning out of the clash of these two opposing ideas.

For example, in Eisenstein’s 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, there is a famous sequence typically referred to as the “Odessa Steps” sequence. In this scene, there are constant clashes of opposing images. Lights are juxtaposed with darks, vertical lines with horizontal lines, lengthy shots with brief ones, close-up shots with long shots, etc.

Another way that Eisenstein differed from Pudovkin is that Pudovkin juxtaposed images that were organic to the context of the film. Eisenstein felt that films could include images that were thematically or metaphorically relevant, regardless of whether they could be found in the location of the film or not. For example, in Eisenstein’s first film Strike, which was made in 1925, he spliced together images of workmen being shot down by machine guns with images of oxen being slaughtered. The oxen were not literally on the location where the story takes place. The image was spliced in for metaphorical purposes, similar to how literature might make a figurative comparison.

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The article is extract from the web http://caferock.org/blogentry.php?blogid=5&entryid=549