The Influence of Soviet Montage in "Hanna"

According to Eisenstein, there are 5 types of montage: Metric, Rhythmic, Tonal, Overtonal and Intellectual montage. In “Hanna”, the director has used the elements of overtonal montage and intellectual in the movie.

Overtonal montage element occur the scene where Hanna was in the hotel. When Hanna walks into the hotel room, she is curious with the electronic devices such as light tubes, kettle, television, fan and etc.  She plays around with the light switch, the hotel manager switch on the television and kettle for her. Hanna touch the kettle when the water is boiled but the surface of the kettle is hot and Hanna gets scald. She tries to close the kettle but she unable to close it, then she start panic because all the electronic devices are out of control. The director use overtonal montage which he cuts the shots of spinning fan, ringing phone, boiling kettle, shower tap and other irrelevant moving object such as helicopter, armies (which showing on television) to show out Hanna’s feeling of panic, anxiety and nervous.

The second montage style be used in this movie is intellectual montage. Hanna accidentally gets her DNA report which stated her has abnormal DNA and this make her confuse with her own background. She went to the internet café to online and checks the information about DNA.

The scene shows that the keywords -“DNA” follow by other words such as “interference” and “intervention into mothers uterus”, it helps audience to related those terms and inference Hanna’s background.  The visual which conduct a series of pictures related to the human experiment, for example experimental rat, DNA chart, a experiment process of test tube inject into cell and state “unsanctioned by scientific community”, a drawing which a bird monster eating a human and birds fly out from human anus, human testing about genetic, finger prints, human development graph and baby born short clips. The elements mention above is to summarize the background of Hanna and shows Hanna carry different DNA with normal people.

Besides, Hanna also search the name of her dad – ‘Erik Heller’, the result of her searching shows that he is related to Hanna’s mother murder cases. The iris of Hanna’s father (Erik) is different form Hanna’s iris. It shows that Hanna has different DNA with her father and she might not biological relations.

Another montage that use by the director is on the scene after Hanna turns on the signal decoder device, then it cut to the scene of Marissa’s bedroom. In the scene it shows Marissa is freshen up herself then it cut back again to Hanna’s house.

Some significant montage that can found in this movie is the scene which shows the soldiers come to Hanna’s house to arrest Erik. There are intercut shots between the close up of Hanna’s eye and a group of soldiers coming towards her house.