Russian Montage
- Written by Robert Adziashvili
Sergei Eisenstein:
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.
He 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.
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.
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.
Eisenstein’s Six Tips for Filmmakers:
‘One must be really gifted and greatly skilled to be able to hear and understand what the scenes suggest, to be able to listen as one edits the film to the whispering of the shots which, on the screen, live a life of their own, frequently extending beyond the limits of the imagination that has conceived them. But to be able to do this, the director must have an exceptionally clear idea of ever scene or phase of the film. At the same time, he must be versatile in choosing the means for expressing his ideas. He must be sufficiently pedantic to know how to achieve the desired effect and at the same time liberal enough to accept unforeseen objects and means that are capable of producing this effect.’
‘When you make your first film, forget all about montage and about me! Here you have learned, but there you must do. And the doing should reveal the learning.’
‘It is true that in practice a film is broken up into separate episodes. But these episodes all hang from the rod of a single ideological, compositional and stylistic whole. The art of cinematography is not in selecting a fanciful framing, or in taking something from a surprising camera-angle. The art is in every fragment of a film being an organic part of an organically conceived whole.’
‘We should not be afraid of the coming era. `{`…`}` We should prepare our consciousness for the coming of new themes, which, multiplied by the potentialities of new techniques, will demand a new aesthetics for skillfully realizing these new themes in the new, breathtaking works of the future.’
‘The most important thing is to have the vision. The next to grasp and hold it. In this there is no difference whether you are writing a film-script, pondering the plan of the production as a whole, or thinking out a solution for some particular details. You must see and feel what you are thinking about. You must see and grasp it. You must hold and fix it in your memory and senses. And you must `{`write them down`}` at once. `{`…`}` Sometimes the hint fixed on paper will be developed and transferred to the screen. Sometimes it will be scrapped. Sometimes the contribution of an actor, or some unforeseen possibility (or more frequently, impossibility) of lighting, or any kind of production circumstance will alter or revise your first vision. But even here, by other means and methods, you will strive to convey in the finished work that invaluable seed that was present in your first vision of what you hoped to see on the screen.’
‘You must be infatuated by the ideas and emotions contained within your subject. Without emotion, you can create nothing. Your infatuation is the powder to produce a creative explosion. But an explosion of emotion is not enough. Feelings must be given a definite direction. Then you must try to find the form which will express the first vivid impressions which moved your whole being. This form must satisfy your consciousness.’
Eisenstein. ‘The Film Form’:
‘Art is a sensory experience. Because the limit of organic form (the passive principle of being) is Nature. The limit of rational form (the active principle of production) is Industry. At the intersection of Nature and Industry stands Art.’
‘Any art form ought to be understood as a communicative medium in which the thing being communicated is not an idea, but an emotion. Language communicates intellect, whereas art communicates sensation. The two are certainly compatible, as in poetry, but also just as certainly inimitably unique. And as communication requires the process of a message being sent and received, we must acknowledge that distinct communication is impossible without the process of time. Thus, as words in a sentence are given meaning through context of contiguous words in the same sentence, and sentences are given sub-textual meaning through context of other sentences within a conversation, given shots within a scene will conform to an over-tonal meaning intrinsically contextualized by other shots within the same scene, and in a broader sense, other scenes throughout the film.’
‘….film is not only comparable to music, it can also incorporate music into its own being. The overtones and undertones of an operatic motif compliment the visual overtones and undertones of the cinematography and editing.’
‘The film’s job is to make the audience help itself, not to ‘entertain it. To grip, not to amuse. The linguistic possibilities of art have been explored since the beginnings of Creation. Time allows for Process, and Process allows for temporal art forms such as music and film to harness emotional expression through the means of story. As audience needs will change over time, the methods by which foundational human emotions are articulated may change with them. But the potential for human expression concerning spiritual/emotional/psycho/physiological experiences will only grow.’
Eisenstein.’The Film Sense’:
…all ideas require – a basis in perception and affect which entails a pre-existing tendency to connect corresponding elements – image, sound and color – and their arrangement, with particular emotional resonances. The experiential synthesis entails a reverberation of these elements compiled in the composition of edited film…’
Representation A and representation B must be so selected from all the possible features within the theme that is being developed, must be so sought for, that their juxtaposition – the juxtaposition of those very elements, and not of alternative ones – shall evoke in the perception and feelings of the spectator the most complete image of the theme itself.
‘Film production facilitates increased intensity in the presentation of correspondences between images, colors, music and human emotion – and film thus presents a new, “polyphonic” or “symphonic” potential for human sensory experience in which the discrete nature of such elements (as may be the case in the contemporary urban experience) is eroded by the effect of their combination, and by the possibilities offered by technology which offers artistic producers a particularly malleable medium in which to recombine elements.’
‘Even in this ‘spontaneity’ the necessary laws, bases, motivations for precisely such and no other distribution of one’s elements pass through the consciousness (and are sometimes even uttered aloud), but consciousness does not stop to explain these motivations – it hurries on towards completion of the structure itself .’
Vsevolod Pudovkin:
‘Editing is not merely a method of the junction of separate scenes or pieces, but is a method that controls the ‘psychological guidance’ of the spectator.’
‘Film is the greatest teacher because it teaches not only through the brain but through the whole body.’
‘In theory the actors on screen do not really act; it’s their context that moves us – something established, through montage, by their relationship to exterior objects.’
At its core I believe that editing, the organization and placement of shots, is a means of expression that is unique to filmmaking — something that still isn’t done in literature, theater, paintings, or the plastic arts. “The foundation of film art is editing.“
Pudovkin’s 5 editing techniques:
Each of these 5 techniques now is a part of Hollywood editor’s arsenal and used in virtually every film made around the world. Becoming familiar with each of them is essential if you want to speak to your audience in a subtle, universal way.
Pudovkin’s techniques describe several ways editing can be used to enhance the viewer’s understanding of a story, and they’re all designed to create a specific reaction from the audience, something he calls relational editing.
01. Contrast: cutting between two different scenarios to highlight the contrast between them. As an example, Pudovkin suggests moving from scenes of poverty to someone really rich to make the difference more apparent.
.02 Parallelism: here you can connect two seemingly unrelated scenes by cutting between them and focusing on parallel features. For example if you were shooting a documentary about fish stocks in the Atlantic, you could cut from a trawler being tossed about in the ocean to a family chomping down on some fish’n’chips – in both scenes drawing our attention to the fish: the object that connects them. It creates an association in the viewers’ mind.
.03 Symbolism: Again, more inter cutting, you move from your main scene to something which creates a symbolic connection for the audience. Pudovkin (living in Soviet Russia) suggested cutting between shots of striking workers being shot by Tsarist police and scenes of cows being slaughtered: in the audience’s mind, they associate the slaughter of the cattle with the slaughter of the workers.
.04 Simultaneity: This is used lots in Hollywood today: cutting between two simultaneous events as a way of driving up the suspense. If you’re making a film about a politician on election night, you might cut between shots of the vote being counted to shots of your main subject preparing to hear the result. This extending of time builds anticipation.
.05 Leit motif: This ‘reiteration of theme’ involves repeating a shot or sequence at key moments as a sort of code. Think how Spielberg uses a ‘point of view’ shot in Jaws showing the shark looking up at swimmers. The first time he does it creates a visual code for “the shark’s about to attack”. Every time we see that underwater POV we know an attack is imminent. He has allowed us to participate in the decoding.
Oleksander Dovzhenko. Cinema as Poetry:
“I have always believed that a person cannot be an artist without a passionate love of nature.’
‘I wanted to make a film about the revolution, not the palace revolution, but the revolution of peasants, workers, and intellectuals who made the revolution and then did not get anything.’
‘The few films that I did complete I made with love and sincerity. In those films lies the primary meaning of my life.’
‘I truly regret having accomplished so little, especially in the last fifteen years. At times I think evil forces surrounded me. I love film art. I have not always loved the people who supervise it.’
‘If it’s necessary to choose between truth and beauty, I’ll choose beauty. In it there’s a larger, deeper existence than naked truth. Existence is only that which is beautiful.’
Oleksander Dovzhenko left his poetic mark on many filmmakers that followed. Bernardo Bertolucci, Piere Paolo Pazolini, Andrey Tarkovsky, Jean Luc Godard and many others.
Dziga Vertov:
‘I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, maneuvering in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.
‘Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.’
‘The film drama is the opium of the people…down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!’
‘It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple.’
”Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten.’
‘My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you.’
‘We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera ‘
‘I am the camera’s eye. I am the machine that shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things-I crawl under them-I climb on them-I am on the head of a galloping horse.’
‘Kino-Eye uses every possible means in montage, comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order, breaking, when necessary, all the laws and conventions of film construction.’
‘Everybody who cares for his art seeks the essence of his own technique.’