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| Lev Kuleshov |
Lev Kuleshov
The founder of the world's first film school and he is very first film theorist for Soviet Montage. Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin are his students and had develop his theories of montage editing. His theory is about what distinguishes cinema from other arts is its capacity to organize fragments (shots) into meaningful, rhythmical sequences. Editing creates meaning and emotions that go far beyond the meaning and content of individual shots.
To illustrate this principle, he created what he has come to be known as the Kuleshov Experiment. In this video, shots of an actor were intercut with various meaningful images (a casket, a bowl of soup, and so on) in order to show how editing changes viewers' interpretations of images. Below is a re-creation of the Kuleshov experiment.
In the early post-Revolutionary period, when there was a desperate shortage of everything, including film stock, Kuleshov worked at the new State Film School with a small workshop of actors, refining his techniques in the so-called "films without film." Central to these was the experiment that has become known as the "Kuleshov effect," which demonstrated that the viewer's interpretation of an individual shot is determined by the context (or sequence) in which that shot is seen. The same shot could be interpreted differently in different contexts. But Kuleshov also appreciated the importance of acting and was responsible for developing the notion of the actor as naturshchik or "model," deriving from the Delsartian school of acting technique. By economical and stylised gestures, refined during an intensive period of rehearsal, the naturshchik could convey precise meanings to the audience in accordance with the director's plan. Kuleshov would produce an "action score" for every movement in his films.
Throughout his career Kuleshov was an eminent teacher: in 1939 he was made a professor at the State Institute of Cinema, and in 1944 he became its director. His theories of cinema are expounded in Russian in his publications The Art of Cinema (1929), The Rehearsal Method in Cinema and The Practice of Film Direction (both 1935), and The Foundations of Film Direction (1941). The importance of his role as teacher can be measured by the fact that almost all these books were published at a time when he was no longer able to make films himself.
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| Dziga Vertov |
Vertov's ideas are more radical than Eisenstein. He did not think that montage was specific to editing and believed that every decision made by the director. He focus less on the emotional aspect that may other Soviets of the time found essential to the theory of montage. He treats the camera as an eye that reveals the truth: the kino-eye, "cinema truth"; it is to present reality and life as it is. The films that he made are the design of "poetic documentaries", tension between the truth and fact, which he wants to present and the way he presenting it.
Dziga Vertov was born in Bialystok, Poland (which at the time was part of Czarist Russia). He and two younger brothers, Mikhail and Boris, were sons of a librarian. When World War 1 broke out, the parents took the family to what seemed the comparative safety of Petroguard (St. Petersburg was renamed to expunge the Germanic link). After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (the Moscow cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. That time he was at the age of 22. While working for Kino-Nedelya he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who at the thime was working as an editor at Goskino. She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as Man with a Movie Camera (1929), it is shown at below the article and Three Songs About Lenin (1934)
The directors of the Soviet Montage got into political trouble after 1935, when social realism became the politically accepted style. They were persecuted for their formalism and “elitism”.
A documentary film is been experimented by Dziga Vertov to grew out of his belief in editing theory. It is a film that are shared by his editor, Elizaveta Svilova (his wife), and his cinematographer, Mikhail Kaufman (his brother), that the true goal of cinema should be present life as it is lived. Through out the story, the filmmakers offer a day-in-the-life portrait of a city from dawn until dusk. There is no words in the film (neither voice-over nor titles), it just has dazzling imagery, kinetically edited - as a celebration of the modern city with a marked emphasis on its building and machinery
New composition was performed by the Alloy Orchestra (1995) had put in the documentary that had by Dziga Vertov for a re-released version, which original is a silent documentary.
Ref:
Barnouw, E. (n.d.). VERTOV, Dziga. Retrieved from http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Ve-Y/Vertov-Dziga.html
Choismier, C. L. (n.d.). Dziga Vertov. Retrieved from http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/artist_1464.html
Kuleshov effect / Efecto Kuleshov "Amar el Cine" [Motion picture]. (2008, January 14). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grCPqoFwp5k&feature=player_embed
Shelokhonov, S. (n.d.). Biography for Lev Kuleshov. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0474487/bio
Taylor, R. (n.d.). KULESHOV, Lev. Retrieved from http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Jo-Ku/Kuleshov-Lev.html#b
The Man With The Movie Camera Dziga Vertov (1927) [Motion picture]. (2011, May 6). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fd_T412qaQ&feature=player_embedded
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