Montage, An Original Film Style

Each film has a distinct purpose associated with it. Whether this purpose is as simple as teaching children a valuable lesson or as complex as criticizing a society 's barriers, there are explicit goals which must be discerningly conveyed. There are specific elements to filmmaking which are designed to contribute to the goals set forth when making a film. Such elements include what would be considered "aesthetics of astonishment," or striking images, editing conflict and other techniques associated with montage filmmaking. Each of these techniques imprint a thought or logic on a film – a kind of "watermark" – that pushes the film itself towards the accomplishment of the original goals. Regardless of the need for the completion of these

Soviet Montage is a movement driven by “Marxist [politics]” and an “economic philosophy” developed in Soviet Russia at the time of revolution. Lenin himself considered film, as an art form as the “most influential of all arts” as it not only entertained but could be used to “[mould] and reinforce values.”( Mast, G. & Kawin, B. F.) Sergei Eisenstein, himself a Marxist, is no exception to this and not only are his films are full of political propaganda, but he is also considered “the greatest master of montage.” .”( Mast, G. & Kawin, B. F.) His film October, called Ten Days That Shook The World in the Western world at the time and butchered due to its content, has always been considered problematic for audiences and critics alike and the standard critique of the film soon became “The Film as a whole is difficult and incoherent.” (Sperbur) Although if analysed properly, you can see that it has powerful political and social messages to convey and comprises of film form that Eisenstein himself called “intellectual film.”

A montage, which was introduced by Sergi Eisenstein, is a type of editing that takes many short shots to put them into one longer sequence. Eisenstein says “Cinema is, first and foremost, montage.” Without it, a movie could take over four hours to set a scene and tell a story. This montage introduces the type of writer Trumbo is without showing the entirety of his career. Without this montage, the viewer would not know how Trumbo had gotten to this

Part of socialist realism’s appeal to the Soviet government was that it provided the framework for an art form that was both easy to understand for a population that was overwhelmingly rural and undereducated, while also disseminating socialist ideals and Soviet policy to a wide range of people. Furthermore, socialist realism, as an art form that would impart ideas to its audience rather than demand that they interpret the work themselves, was intended to prevent viewers from coming to anti-Soviet conclusions, whether they were intentionally inserted into the film or not. Socialist realism was no doubt, in part, a reaction to more radical art forms that had been pioneered in the years following the revolution and during the Cultural Revolution. Eisenstein’s goals for montage were similar to that of socialist realism. Even prior to 1932, Eisenstein used montage to promote socialist ideology and support the

The ‘cult’ of the Second World War for the Soviet Union, Denise Youngblood writes, was heavily supported during the war years through the medium of film. Of the seventy films produced in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945, 70 percent were focused on subjects directly pertaining to war. This is an overwhelming percentage of war films when compared with the genre trends of other European film industries of this time. Youngblood notes, however, that these films often did not depict frontline battles, or even the homefront itself, as was the tendency of other nations’ films. The devastation of the Eastern Front was simply too enormous for ‘cheery Stalinist propaganda’ to hide, and Soviet audiences acutely aware of its demoralising reality.

The montage was used to edit together the different shots to form a sequence to condense space, time, and information. For example, the job Jane got assigned at the beginning of the film was to edit the shots in which they were juxtaposed to help compress time and convey a lot of information in the short span of the airing time. Frequently changing the audience's expectations as the camera went in and out of shot between what Jane was trying to play on the news television network and the actual

Tracking shots also play an important role in externalizing mental state of film’s characters. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) shares same idea on shooting the city views. Dziga Vertov objectively records city secenry with a kino eye in Man with a Movie Camera, while Dimitri Kirsanoff creates an unsure and unsafe feelings in the beginning of Ménilmontan in order to foreshadow the following plots and mental states of characters. 【4:47-5:13 5:39-5:46 6:08-6:37】In the 25 minutes of this film, there is the same tracking shots of city view as the beginning of the film. Gloom and sad feelings of the girl’s inner state is expressed by those dizzy shots combines with rainy weather.

From 1924 to 1930, Soviet Russia experienced transformations that not only shaped the nation’s political perspective, but also cultivated a name for itself within the arts. War in combination with the demand for social justice and change encouraged people toward creative expression. Dziga Vertov was one of the prominent figures in Russia during this time. He was a documentarian that focused on depicting the highest form of reality in film. Vertov believed the only way to convey the highest form of reality and creativity in film was to never include a predetermined story, prearranged props, or actors.

In “A Man with a Movie Camera,” Vertov does not portray the city of Moscow in a realistic manner, but rather with the use of cinematic techniques and editing. His intention was to capture and synchronize the worker with the mechanical in a joyful relationship. The film emphasizes that work is joyful and uses imagery to display the rhythm of the workers and the machines. An example of this “joyful” work can be seen in the emotional expression of a woman working at a machine folding cigarette boxes.

As mentioned in Sikov, Film Studies: An Introduction, Eisenstein used montage to convey and explore revolutionary ways for the audience to watch films. Eisenstein believed that montage must consist of colliding shots. Editing the shots rapidly, to exhibit conflict, making a sequence that more intense. His film, Battleship Potemkin, is a great example of the soviet montage. There’s one sequence in particular, The Odessa Step that helps express this. It starts out with a wide angle shot of the crowd, followed by multiply medium shots of the citizens waving to the sailors. shows their facial expression, as they have wave to the ship. Then suddenly, we get a closeup shot of a woman in distress, quickly followed by a extreme closeup shot of the same woman, looking even more frantic.

Realism’s relationship with cinema and film form is one which has been debated since the beginnings of film theory. There are many different arguments on how best to capture realism on film. It came to the forefront of film theory in the 1930s and 40s through the Italian neorealism movement. Andre Bazin was a french film critic and theorist who is best known for his writing on realism in film. He argued that cinema is fundamentally realistic and that filmmakers should not alter what an audience views, with exception. He favours the long deep focus shot such as those used in Orson Well’s Citizen Kane. Sergei Eisenstein, a soviet director and theorist, favoured the opposite approach to achieving realism in film. Basing his theory around early work by Kuleshov and Pudovkin, Eisenstein championed montage as the only way to capture realism in film. His theory is based around the idea that reality is dialectical, with much of his work stemming from the politics of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He argues that as reality is dialectical, then the filmmaking that seeks to capture this reality must also be dialectical. On the face of it these methods are polar opposites however they both attempt to solve the question of how best to capture realism in the cinema. Through this shared goal there is similarity in the two different theorists approaches that hint at neither method necessarily being more effective in capturing reality. Despite the debate on how best to capture realism,

Soviet montage theory is an approach to understand and create cinema that relies heavily upon editing. This was based on the concept of montage which was idea that arises from the collision of independent shots wherein each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other.

I have chosen to use an extract from the film ‘Citizen Kane’, directed by Orson Wells (1941) for this assignment. The technical aspects I have chosen to explore will be the use of both mise-en-scene and editing.

Unlike Montage where by a combination series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense space, time, and information, Soviet Montage on the other hand is a style of filmmaking that is evolved to immerse the audience in a story and disguise technique was turned upside down in order to create the opposite emotional effect to bring the audience to the edge of their seat, and in the case of the Odessa Steps sequence, to push the viewer towards a feeling of vertigo. In a simpler form, Soviet Montage combination series of short shots are edited into a sequence to create symbolic meaning. One main characteristic of Soviet Montage films is the downplaying of individual

Formal context is a big part to why movies are how they are. In Double Indemnity (1944) clip, by Billy Wilder, there are many formal context elements that are important to why the scenes are the way they are. Some of these are the types of shots, camera movement, lighting, and the mise-en-scene. This paper analyzes the 5 shots in the 2:33 minute scene in depth.