SOVIET MONTAGE

WHAT WAS THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT?

• Russian Revolution in 1917, The Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar to establish Communism.
• Needed to consolidate power and communicate their ideas to a huge country.
• Film a new medium that could communicate to the masses.
• Films to be used as:
• Propaganda to explain the ideas of the Communist party
• Agitate the population to join and support the party
• Agitation + Propaganda = Agitprop

HOW DID SOVIET FILM THEORY DEVELOP?

• Founding of the worlds first film school in Moscow.
• Aim was to train film makers to produce Agitprop films.
• Lev Kuleshov led workshops sessions where D.W. Griffith’s film “Intolerance” was studied in detail.
• Lack of available film stock led them to re-edit the film as an experiment, rather than shooting their own material
• He became interested in montage (editing) as a way of creating meaning.

WHAT IS THE KULESHOV EFFECT?

• Having experimented with Intolerance, Kuleshov realized that reordering shots could change their meaning.
• He conducted an experiment, inter cutting shots of an actor with shots of:
• A hot bowl of soup
• A child in a coffin
• An attractive woman
• Viewers interpreted the actor’s expression as hungry, grief-stricken and aroused respectively, even though it was the same shot each time.

HOW WAS MONATGE USED TO CREATE AGITPROP?

• Montage was a useful way to communicate meaning:
• Cinema was silent so films needed to communicate without dialogue.
• Intertitles were also no good as the population were mostly illiterate.
• Another film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, used the principles of montage to create films that would persuade viewers to support the Bolsheviks.
• His film “Battleship Potemkin” contains a famous sequence in which Tsarist soldiers massacre a crowd of unarmed civilians.

WHAT ARE EISENTEINS 5 TYPES OF MONTAGE?

1. Metric Montage

Cutting according to a regular, specific number of frames, no matter what is happening in the shot.

2. Rhythmic Montage

Cutting according to the content of the shots. Creates smooth visual continuity between shots.

3. Tonal Montage

Cutting according to emotional tone of the shots. Shots of a sleeping baby suggest a calm tone, requiring less frequent cuts.

4. Overtonal Montage 

Considering the use of the previous three kinds of cutting when assembling longer sequences.

5. Intellectual Montage

Intercutting images unrelated in continuity to suggest ideas and/or concepts.

Creative Geography- Montage could be used to create imaginary spaces that could not exist in real life. In a scene from Just a Gigolo, David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich shot their parts a month apart in different rooms but editing is used to try to create the illusion that they are interacting in the same space.