Soviet Montage: BSA 106 (Screen Arts 1) Week 6

BSA 106 (Screen Arts 1) Week 6
{MONTAGE}

• Sergei Eisenstein

          Eisenstein believed there are five methods of montage:

        - Metric = A mathematical way of cutting every subsequent number of frames or seconds, no                                matter what is happpening on screen.
        - Rhythmic = A way of cutting based on what's happening in the scene, so cutting on action.
        -Tonal = Combining different shots or images that have the same overarching tone or theme.
        - Over-tonal = A way of combining all of the methods above to make something larger than the                                   sum of its parts.
        - Intellectual = This method takes two separate shots or images, with separate meanings, and                                        combining them to create new meaning e.g. "The Kushelov Effect".

        Eisenstein uses each of these methods in his films.

• Dziga Vertov 

        Vertov saw the camera as an extension of himself and took a documentary approach to                         filmmaking.  He felt that the purpose of a movie camera, and film in general, was not for                     narrative purposes but to capture the world around us.

       He saw montage as a way to link shots so that they create a common theme or plot, and not as a          way to evoke emotion. He was creating "poetic documentary film".

      Eisenstein saw Vertov's work as nothing more than a metric form of Montage, but Vertov didn't           use montage in the Eisenstein way, shunning the concepts of 'metric' or 'rhythmic', he edited his           films based on his own creative intuition.

• Vsevolod Pudovkin

         Pudovkin saw editing as a way to build a story from individual shots, and from that create a                story. He even saw acting as a product mainly produced by the editor. As a student of Kushelov          he understood the idea of how the arrangement of shots can change the context of the scene.                Pudovkin noted that editing was completely unique to film and not present in any other art                  forms, in general his view on films was that they were primarily made in the editing room.

        He theorized that there were five different editing techniques that could manipulate the view the         audience viewed the film:

       - Contrast = Cutting from one shot to a drastically different shot, the viewer relates these two and           creates a common theme between the two that would not be present if the shots were shown                 individually, a variation on "The Kushelov Effect".

       - Parallelism = This technique combines two or more scenes or shots that are similar to eachother          in some way, creating a connection between the two.

       - Symbolism = Cutting from a shot to a shot or image more abstract or unrelated, creating a sense                                 of symbolism.

       - Simultaneity = AKA Cross Cutting, two scenes playing out at the same time but in different                                         locations. 

       - Leit Motif = Imagery related to a specific character, theme or location. The leit motif is usually                               present with the subject it represents, the audience creates a connection between                                   the two.

A contemporary director who I think has taken influence from Soviet Montage is Christopher Nolan. His movies are very well edited and most of the techniques above can be observed in his work, maybe with exception to metric cutting. The most prominent that I've noticed in his work has to be simultaneity, movies like The Prestige and Inception are great demonstrations of this technique.