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Home , Alexander Dovzhenko, Battleship Potemkin, Footage, Kuleshov Effect, Montage (filmmaking)

FACTFILE: GCE AS LEVEL MOVING IMAGE ARTS SOVIET

Soviet Montage

Learning outcomes • identify the formalist style of Soviet Montage and explain how it challenged the conventions of the Students should be able to: continuity style; • demonstrate an awareness of the origins of Soviet • discuss the formalist style of Soviet Montage in Montage and the new theories of editing that the key works of Soviet cinema; came out of ; • identify the influence of Soviet Montage on the • demonstrate an awareness of the relationship work of subsequent filmmakers; and between Soviet Montage and photomontage; • analyse the editing styles of filmmakers who have been influenced by Soviet Montage.

Course content

Soviet Montage was a new approach to cinematic leaders of the Bolshevik revolution wanted to usher storytelling developed by a visionary group of in a brave new world of workers’ power and struggle Russian filmmakers in the 1920’s that included against the ruling classes. The revolution triggered , , an explosion of innovation and experimentation in and . Based on the principle the arts as historian David Gillespie explains, that editing is the foundation of film art, Soviet “The 1920’s in Russia were a period of great artistic Montage is one of the most significant formalist ferment, and considerable cultural cross-fertilisation, movements in silent cinema and continues to as artists of various hues and specialisms sought to influence today. create new forms and new ways of perception and communication in their creativity.”

Origins of Soviet Montage The Bolshevik leaders viewed the new art of the cinema as a powerful tool of education and The origins of Soviet Montage lie in the shockwaves instruction for the Russian people, the majority of released by the Russian Revolution of October whom were illiterate. During the 1917, a seismic political event that challenged (1919-1921) special trains were sent out into the the established global order and introduced new countryside to show short about ways of thinking about art, culture and politics. The the revolution. As this was the first time that rural

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communities had ever seen moving images, these fully unleashed in Eisenstein’s depiction of the films made a powerful impression. brutal assault by ranks of on helpless crowds fleeing down the steps. According to David Gillespie, Russian film-makers, “were committed to developing an art form distinct As Marilyn Fabe explains, “Eisenstein held from that currently practiced in Hollywood… that proper film continuity should not proceed Most directors saw film, not as an entertainment smoothly, but through a series of shocks. Whenever medium, but primarily as a specific means of possible, he tried to create some kind of visual channeling ideas and images to the viewer; an conflict or discontinuity between the two shots, instrument of propaganda. The desire for change with the goal of creating a jolt in the spectator’s and a new cinematic art lay behind the idea of psyche. The visual explosions on the screen were montage.” (Gillespie, 2000) intended to create a continual source of stimulants or shocks to keep the audience wide awake.

Forerunners to Soviet Montage Eisenstein created optical conflicts by juxtaposing shots whose graphic elements visually contrasted. Forerunners to Soviet Montage include Russian For example, he followed an extreme long shot of Constructivist artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, the citizens of running down the steps with who experimented with the techniques of photo- an extreme close-up of the legs of a man on the montage, creating powerful visual juxtapositions verge of falling… he edited pieces of film so that by cutting up contrasting photographic images and the directional movements within juxtaposed shots reassembling them into striking collages. clashed. That is, a shot of a crowd running in the direction of screen left would clash in the next shot The first theorist of Soviet cinema, , with an image of the crowd running in the direction also helped to pave the way for Soviet Montage. His of screen right.” (Fabe, 2004) theories on the editing patterns which structure film narrative, known as the“ ”, This structuring of film narrative as a series of were based on a study of the Hollywood films of jarring conflicts was in complete contrast to the D.W. Griffith. Eisenstein and his colleagues were smooth continuity of the Classical Hollywood Style, also particularly impressed by Griffith’s use of where shot construction moved gradually from long editing techniques such as cross-cutting, but they shot to medium shot to close-up. The rules of the believed that editing could be employed to much continuity style were to avoid sudden changes in greater effect. shot sizes as this was seen to unsettle the audience, drawing attention to the editing and disrupting the viewer’s immersion in the story. Eisenstein’s abrasive Case Study: Sergei Eisenstein’s montage editing techniques aimed to achieve precisely that effect of disorientation and disruption. Eisenstein directed three silent films - Strike Eisenstein’s intention in the Odessa sequence was (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October therefore to deliberately disorientate the viewer (1928) - using a daring new approach to editing in order to convey the frightening reality of being that radically departed from the conventions of the trapped under lethal fire. No stable viewing position Hollywood continuity style. is offered to the audience as would be expected in a Hollywood film. No of the Odessa Battleship Potemkin tells the story of a mutiny Steps is ever revealed, only fragmented images of of sailors from Russia’s Black Sea fleet during people running down the steps, edited together the failed 1905 revolution. The average feature with rapid close-ups of panic-stricken individuals film in 1925 was 90 minutes long and contained gunned down by soldiers. At the heart of the around 600 shots. Although only 80 minutes long, sequence is the traumatic suspense of the runaway Battleship Potemkin contains 1346 shots, some pram, the fate of which we never discover. only lasting a split second. As Marilyn Fabe explains, “The lack of spatial The film’s central set-piece, the massacre on orientation on the Odessa steps works because it the Odessa Steps, has become the most famous compels spectators to experience something of the sequence in cinema history (00:49:00-00:55:43). same mental confusion and loss of bearings that The explosive effect of rapid montage editing is the people on the steps suffer…The quick pace of

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the editing, which jerks the spectator’s attention which draws much of its power from Eisenstein’s from place to place, likewise mirrors the wild way technique of montage editing. one’s attention would jump from one perception to another when one is in a state of anxiety or The traumatic nature of the event is conveyed by panic. In this way, through his editing, Eisenstein a violent dislocation in cinematic time and space. transfers the panic of the people on the steps to the The director plays with the fabric of time through spectator.” (Fabe, 2004) rapid-fire editing between three different levels or planes of “reality” – the present, shot in the conventional Hollywood style, and two different Legacy of Soviet Montage representations of the past in – grainy, faded, colour images captured by a Super 8mm Eisenstein’s innovations in the Odessa Steps home and black and white archive- sequence have left a legacy of artistic inspiration like that shifts suddenly between sharp and for generations of filmmakers. To independent film blurred focus. directors such as Sally Potter he demonstrated the visceral power of film language and what the Throughout the sequence, we are constantly thrown cinema could achieve once filmmakers stepped off-balance by a sudden movement into blurred, outside the boundaries of the continuity style. . The stark contrast between the frenetic pace of the editing and the almost freeze-framed, Interviewed by Renny Bartlett for his blurred images of motion creates a dizzying effect; a documentary on Battleship Potemkin, she sense of events spinning out of control. comments, “With hindsight a lot of things were invented for the film that people think they are The explosive editing has a visceral impact on inventing now – such as strapping a camera to the our senses. It is as if reality has been split apart – body and running down a flight of stairs; a dolly shattered into multiple fragments by the bullets of shot; cutting from a wide to an extreme close-up; the assassins. As viewers, we must piece together lots of jumps and a sense of movement through the different fragments as they are presented to us time as well as through space.” (Bartlett, 2001) by the eyewitnesses.

Eisenstein’s striking use of the emotive image of a An unsettling feeling of disorientation is created child in peril has become iconic, with the director by the rapidly changing camera speed, camera reworking the runaway pram shot sizes, unconventional angles of view, image scene in his 1987 film The Untouchables. Leading formats, chaotic sounds and blurred focus. The Hollywood film-makers have harnessed the power director combines these techniques of visual of dynamic, elliptical editing to viscerally shock and dissonance and distortion in a particularly powerful disturb audiences. Famous examples include the way to communicate a sense of mass panic, chaos shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the and collective fear. These are exactly the same rapid montage of slow-motion violence in the final raw emotions that Eisenstein generates through scene of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), montage editing in the Odessa Steps sequence the brutal, disorientating fight scenes in Martin Scorsese’s (1980) and the collective trauma of the eyewitnesses to the president’s References: Gillespie, D. (2000). Early Soviet Cinema. UK: assassination in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991). Wallflower Press, Chapter 1, pps. 6-7. Fabe, M. (2004). Closely Watched Films. University of California Press, Chapter 2, pps. 27-33.

Case Study: JFK (1991) Bartlett, R (2001). Episode 4: ‘Battleship Potemkin’. In Art that Shook the World. BBC 2, (broadcast 28 Apr 2001). The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 is one of the most contested events in American history, where the truth has become lost in a fog of conspiracy theories and wildly conflicting versions of reality. In JFK, director Oliver Stone sets out to uncover the conspiracy, staging a devastating re-enactment of the assassination

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