1. Soviet Montage

2. Soviet Cinema in the 1920s
Vibrant film culture following the Russian Revolution
Lenin: cinema would be the most important of the arts in the effort to reunite his nation
power to attract and instruct/indoctrinate
Influential developments in film theory:
Character and Society
Education/Propaganda
The Kuleshov Effect
Montage Editing

3. Soviet Film Theory: Character and Society
Downplay individual characters
characters are shown as members of society and of different social classes

4. Soviet Film Theory: Education/Propaganda
Nationalized film industry, established a national film school
All-Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK)
under the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros)
Political leaders saw film as the key to involving audiences in political and intellectual revolution
Limited to one basic storyline: triumph of the people over bourgeois oppression
“Art is not a mirror which reflects the historical struggle, but a weapon of that struggle” --Dziga Vertov (contemporary of Eisenstein)

5. Soviet Film Theory: The Kuleshov Effect
Lev Kuleshov teacher at VGIK
Central belief: the viewer’s response in cinema depends less on the individual shot and more on the editing or montage
Famous experiment with shot juxtapositions:
First shot: c/u of actor with neutral expression, then joined this shot to:
c/u of a bowl of soup
c/u of a coffin with a corpse
c/u of a little girl playing

6. …The Kuleshov Effect
Test audiences praised the actor’s versatility in showing hunger, sorrow, and pride, even though the shot of the actor remained exactly the same each time
Hitchcock
Definition: One of the basic theoretical principles of editing is that the meaning produced by joining two shots together transcends the visual information contained in each individual shot (A+B=C)

7. Soviet Film Theory: The Montage
Believed in the power of montage to fragment and reassemble footage to manipulate the viewer’s perception and understanding
Audiences could derive an emotional meaning from the juxtaposition of two completely unrelated shots

8. …The Montage
Meaning created by juxtaposition of shots, not the content of individual images
Sound and visual could be treated independently or used together
shots in film and phrases of music could be timed together to increase the impact of a key shot
rhythm of music can accent the rhythm of editing/the montage (ex)

9. Sergei Eisenstein Strike (1924) Battleship Potemkin (1925)
October (1927)
The General Line (1928)
equal to Griffith as a pioneering genius
financed by the soviet government

10. Sergei Eisenstein
regarded film editing as a creative and artistic process:
one shot (thesis) collides with another shot of opposing content (antithesis) to produce a new idea (synthesis)
forces the viewer to reach conclusions about the interplay between shots