[Class Assembling]
Hi, John Hess from FilmmakerIQ.com - in this lesson we'll look at how early Soviet Filmmakers
established the theory of Montage - an editing style of assembling together different shots
that added a new sophisticated element to cinematic language.
At the end of the First World War, Russia was in disarray. The Bolsheviks led by Vladimir
Lenin had overthrown the Tsar in 1917 and the country of 160 million people, mostly
poor and illiterate, was torn apart from years of civil war. The first task of the ruling
party was to consolidate and communicate and they turned to film as a mass communication medium
But the producers and technicians of the pre revolutionary cinema were capitalists and
most of them were driven out or uncooperative with the Bolshevik government. Resources were
scarce - what little they had was consolidated into a Cinema Committee within the New People's
Commissariat of Education. Headed by Lenin's wife, the Cinema Committee founded a film
school to train new filmmakers. This VGIK - All Union State Institute of Cinematography
or Moscow Film School was founded in 1919 and would become the first Film School in the world.
The school primary function was to train people to make films to support the Bolshevik political
party - making newsreels for the purposes of agitation and propaganda - agitprop.
But the Moscow film school wasn't only a communist mouthpiece, faculty were also interested
in the theory of film - one of the school's cofounders Lev Kuleshov would bring new insight
into the psychological workings of the motion picture.
Lev Kuleshov was one of the few prerevolutionary filmmakers to remain in Russia after 1917.
Working as a newsreel cameraman during the Revolution, Kuleshov was instrumental in the
founding of the VGIK. But Kuleshov's superiors at the film school didn't think the young
20-something could work well in a traditional curriculum setting so they let him conduct
his own study group outside the formal structure of the school. This study group became known
as the Kuleshov Workshop attracted the more radical and innovative students.
With film stock being so rare, Kuleshov spent most of the time making films without celluoid
- writing scenarios and assembling actors in a sort of mock filmmaking exercise. But
studies took a major turn when D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" played for the first time
in Moscow in May of 1919. Lenin loved "Intolerance" for it's plea for the proletariat and agitation
quality and he ordered it to be screened all across the Soviet Union. Intolerance not only
became the most influential film in Russia for the next 10 years, but also a subject
of deep intense study at the Kuleshov Workshop. They dissected D.W. Griffith's editing structure,
even deconstructing the shots and reassembling them in hundreds of ways to examine the impact
that different edits had.
Once new film stock was becoming available in 1922 as a result of a Soviet-German trade
agreement, Kuleshov was ready to experiment with some of the lessons learned from studying Griffith's film.
The first experiment would illustrate what has become known as the Kuleshov effect. Kuleshov
took a shot of an expressionless face and created three different short films, editing
the face with a bowl of hot soup, girl in the coffin, or the seductive woman on a couch.
He showed the film to an audience and they raved about the range of emotion the actor
portrayed from pensiveness over the thought of forgotten soup, mourning over the loss
of a loved one and lust for the woman on the lounge. Even though we know the shot of the
actor exactly the same in each scenario, audiences read meaning into the actor's face by the
nature of the shots around it.
In another experiment - Kuleshov took three shots - an actor smiling, a close up of a
revolver, and the same actor looking frightened. Shown to an audience the interpretation was
the actor grew cowardly. But reverse the order of the shots, and now the audience interprets
the actor as growing brave. It was the same exact shots, but the the order changed the
meaning. Though other filmmakers like D.W. Griffith had practiced this type of editing
instinctively, Kuleshov was the first to put it in theory - the meaning of film was not
only in spatial reality - how things are arranged in a frame, but in the film strip itself - the
sequence of the shot.
To further push the boundaries Kuleshov experimented with artificial landscapes through "creative
geography" - Cutting together pieces of film captured in totally different locations,
Kuleshov could created a believable fictionalized geography in film that didn't exist in real
life. This was a departure from the continuity editing of the West that sought to smooth
cuts with techniques like cutting on action and the 180 degree rule - Kuleshov was demonstrating
that film could transcend space - that the viewer would construct the geography as they
were watching the film.
The creation of the film doesn't start when the cameras roll - thats just getting the
raw materials. A film is born in the edit which the Soviets called montage from the
French verb monter which means to assemble.
This montage theory would see even greater refinement by one of Russia's most famous
silent filmmakers and student of the Kuleshov worksop: Sergei Eisenstein.
Serigei Eisenstein along with D.W. Griffith are the two pioneering geniuses of modern
cinema. Though Griffith would create the language of continuity editing through practice and
practical problem solving, Eisenstein would approach film intellectually. Griffith and
his American contemporaries used film and editing techniques to enhance emotional impact
almost as an extenstion of 19th century theatrical method, whereas Eisenstein used editing to
break free of the confines of time and space and communicate abstract ideas in a new and
modern way.
Battleship Potemkin would be Eisenstein's most critically acclaimed and influential
film. Shot in 1925 as part of a Twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution against
the Tsar, Potemkin took ten weeks to shoot with the famous Odessa Steps sequence shot
in seven days. The editing took another 2 weeks to accomplish - running 86 minutes long,
Potemkin contained 1,346 shots.
Battleship Potemkin was an international success - a clear win for Eisenstein and his use of
montage to elicit emotional response from the viewer. So influential was the film that
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called it "a marvelous film without equal in the
cinema ... anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film"
The film was pure propaganda - but the best ever made. Key to Potemkin's success was
the editing - which is where Eisenstein begins to articulate his most important contribution
to film theory. Eisenstein, an true intellectual and Marxist, saw montage as a process which
operated in the same way as a Marxist dialectic - which is a way of looking at the course
of history as the perpetual conflict in which a thesis or force collides with an anti-thesis
or counterforce to create a new phenomenon called a synthesis.
Eisenstein saw the collision of a one shot or montage cell with another as creating conflict
that produced a new idea. This new idea would become it's own thesis and collide with
another anti-thesis creating yet another synthesis idea. Again and again these dialectics build
up in a film like a series of controlled explosions in an internal combustion engine, driving
the film forward.
On the subject of editing Eisenstein lists five methods of montage or how these collisions
between shots can be created each one building up in complexity.
The first and most basic is the Metric - cutting based purely on the length of shot. This elicits
the most basic emotional response, that of tempo which can be raised or lowered for effect.
Next is Rhythmic montage - which is much like metric montage in that it's based on time
and tempo, but rhythmic concerns itself with what's in the frame - cutting in tempo and
with action. In this shot from Potemkin, the rhythm of the marching solidiers legs drives
the movement in the sequence beyond the basic cut..
Next in complexity the Tonal montage which isn't concerned with time but with the tone
of the shot - from lighting, shadows and shapes in the frame. Cutting between shots of different
aesthetic tones creates these Marxist dialectics
Above that is Overtonal - which is on a larger scale macro cell that combines metric, rhythmic
and tonal montage - essentially how whole sequences play against each other.
Then lastly was the type of montage that most interested Eisenstein - the Intellectual or
ideological montage. Whereas the previous methods focused on inducing emotional response,
the intellectual montage sought to express abstract ideas by creating relationships between
opposing visual intellectual concepts.
A simple example in Battleship Potemkin is the intercutting of the priest tapping on
a cross with an officer tapping on the hilt of a sword - to express a message of corrupt
association of the church and the state. Another example is the final sequence in the Odessa
steps. Three quick shots of a rising stone lion - representing the rise of proletariat.
So invested in the intellectual montage - Eisenstein dedicated his next film, "October" - a
10th anniversary recreation of the Bolshevik Revolution, to exploring its possibilities.
Running at just under three hours with lots of intellectual and ideological montage imagery
- October was an experimental film of immense proportions that ultimately left audiences cold.
The wild cuts were simply too much for audiences to follow. While intellectual montage can
evoke deep abstract ideas, without being rooted in a strong narrative frame work, as it was
in Battleship Potemkin, the intellectual montage was too much abstraction for audiences to follow.
Some film theorists such as French film critic Andre Bazin claimed that dialectical montage
was too manipulative and too totalitarian in the way it seeks to control the audience
by ignoring natural spatial and time relationships found in continuity editing. The debate may
be a matter of taste but the effects of early Soviet Silent filmmakers and their montage
theory would be refined and pushed even further in the 1950s as the French New Wave as well
as Hollywood visionaries like Alfred Hitchcock began incorporating montage as part of their
story telling technique.
With both the continuity style of D.W. Griffith with emphasis on clear understandable space
and time and the Soviet montage style which ignored space and time to create impact through
the juxtaposition of different images, the rudiments of cinematic language emerged in
roughly the first 30 years of Cinema's existence, quickly becoming a nuanced and intricate art
form through experimentation and theory. These first practitioners, who studied and built
on each other's work, would in turn be studied and imitated by the next generation of filmmakers
- on and on carrying the human tradition of storytelling. Be part of that tradition, study
and go make something great. I'm John Hess, I'll see you at FilmmakerIQ.com