Soviet montage theory

Montage

Background

History

• Continuity editing – Continuity, like montage, situates editing as the driving formal element of narrative film making. DW Griffith developed and implemented a grammar of film through his use of continuity editing by establishing a logical progression of shots as to make a story intelligible to the audience. Continuity differs from montage in both its production, effect and intention.
• * Production – Continuity maintains a subservience to a predetermined narrative. For example, in Griffith's pinnacle film Birth of a Nation, the editing was completely determined in reaction to the script's narrative. Montage, on the other hand, holds that the dialectical collision of images creates a film's meaning, and thus is less concerned with a script than it is the synthesis of associations between shots.
• * Effect and Intention – Continuity editing is oriented spatially; meaning it fills gaps between locations and moments in a film's narrative progression. The 180 degree rule, in which an imaginary straight line is imposed by a director in order to create logical association between characters/objects that require a shot-reverse shot, is used to solidify the spectator in a relation to the image in a way that makes visual sense. Montage may include these elements as well, but is not determined by them. Space can be discontinuous in order to disorient a spectator. For example, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera documents the everyday activities of people from various locations in the Soviet Union, but never gives priority to a continuity of action.
• Sergei Eisenstein – Though not the inventor of montage, Eisenstein codified its use in Soviet and international film making and theory. Beginning with his initial work in the Proletkult, Eisenstein adapted montage to the cinema and expanded his theories throughout his career to encompass the internal nature of the image. He was the most outspoken and ardent advocate of montage as revolutionary form. His work has been divided into two periods. The first is characterised by "mass dramas" in which his focus is on formalizing Marxist political struggle of the proletariat. His films, Strike and The Battleship Potemkin among the most noted of the period, centered on the capacity for the masses to revolt. The second period is characterized by a shift to individualized narratives that sprang from a synchronic understanding of montage inspired by his foray into dialectical materialism as a guiding principle. The shift between the two periods is indicative of the evolution of Marxist thinking writ large, culminating in an understanding of the material underpinning of all social and political phenomena. Though largely uncredited by contemporary filmmakers, Eisenstein's theories are constantly demonstrated in films across genres, nations, languages and politics.
• The Kuleshov Effect - Lev Kuleshov's work is largely considered the basis from which all montage theory is derived. The Kuleshov Group, composed of Kuleshov and his students, set out to determine the essence of cinema. Rote repetition of the components of the cinema plagued their initial findings: competent acting, provocative lighting and elaborate scenery were not intrinsic to the filmic form. In a study of two films- "an American and a comparable Russian one"- the group identified the American film as extraordinary given the short average shot time. They then inferred that the American organization of shots was perceptually appealing to audiences. Lengthy shots, as seen in the Russian film, make the task of mentally interpreting a pattern difficult. In an essay published in Vestnik Kinematografii in 1916, Kuleshov first coined the term montage to explain the phenomena of shot succession. In a pinnacle experiment, Kuleshov combined independent shots of Ivan Mosjoukine, a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a woman on a sofa. The strategic ordering of the shots had a marked effect on audience interpretation of the Mosjoukine's neutral expression. This experiment demonstrated cinema's unique capacity as an art form to conjure specific reactions from the relationship between indexical images. It further demonstrated that montage is dialectical in nature, and that the synthesis of images creates unique political meanings. Recently, Kuleshov's conclusions have been brought into question. In The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment, Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley contest Kuleshov's findings as unscientific and merely a product of cinematic myth. They conclude that "Kuleshov's effect- understood in terms of shot juxtapositions rather than associational cues- may tell us little about film or visual communication, but its lingering power tells us a lot about the symbolic uses of the past."

  Adoption abroad

Contemporary uses

Terms and concepts

• Dialectic – A relationship of conflict that results in a new form. This is taken explicitly and directly from Marx's explanation of the dialectic as the process by which social and political change occurs. There are varying and competing interpretations of how this was to be practiced in Soviet cinema, but the embedding of a dialectical process to montage was an understood goal of most notable Soviet filmmakers. The dialectic traditionally is composed thus:
• * Thesis – An initial force, statement, or mode. For film, thesis could be narrative, as in the foregrounded social harmony that is later disrupted; visual, like an opening shot of a sequence; or historical presumption, an economic and political situation which carries particular assumptions about the film's context.
• * Antithesis – A conflictual force, statement, or mode designed to negate or otherwise amend the thesis in some way.It is at the point of antithesis that some disagreement occurs. Pudovkin's belief that images build upon one another over the course of the film functions differently than Eisenstein's theory of collision. These two interpretations situate antithesis as either negation or addition. The implication is that the synthetic result is either product or cumulative, respectively.
• * Synthesis – The result of the conflict between the antithesis and thesis, which possess within it the mechanics of its own undoing. Montage was an editorial process whereby new concepts were possible only through the relating of two or more shots, and/or the relationship of elements within a single shot. The affective result might be best demonstrated through the cattle slaughter scene in Strike, in which images of violence inflicted on workers is cut within images of a cow being slaughtered in an abattoir. These images work dialectically to produce revulsion and disgust at the notion of the oppression of the proletariat.
• Stimulants – A formal element whose combination with other elements produces the sum total of montage's effect. Its modifiers "Dominant" and "Secondary" are taken from musical composition theory in which harmonic and melodic resonances are reactions to dominant and secondary notes, chords, beats and time signatures.
• * Dominant – The element or stimulus that determines all subsequent and subordinate elements or stimuli. For films that implement Montage Theory, these dominant elements are determined prior to shooting and inform the script and editing process. Not all dominants are singular elements but can be the product or sum total of all stimulants. For example, in The General Line, Eisenstein determined dominant stimulants based on the composition of single shots "by the method of 'democratic' equal rights for all the stimulants, viewed together as a complex". This was Eisenstein's attempt to parallel Japanese Kabuki theater, which composed movement in a simultaneously fragmented but hierarchal fashion. More frequently, however, dominants took overt and singular form. In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov constructs one sequence- scarcely definable as a "scene"- through the dominant movement of circularity, displaying industrial threading machines and human movements that performed circularly.
• * Secondary/Subordinate – The elements or stimuli that support and highlight the dominant. In film, as in music, these create a harmony between and through shots. Without secondary/subordinate stimuli, the internal shot structure lacked the requisite dialectical composition necessary for Socialist Realism's revolutionary form. Eisenstein asserted that competing and complementary secondary stimuli were useful in conjuring particular psychic responses from the audience. Overtonal analysis of sound in The General Line, for example, reveals that there is an "orchestral counterpoint" to almost every shot, coaxing a texture from the film, rather than a purely visual or aural experience.
• Theme – The generalizable content of a film. Here, we draw primarily from Vsevolod Pudovkin's work in Film Technique, in which he argues that the foundational work of montage is realized by first determining a theme. Unlike Eisenstein, Pudovkin believed that all necessary elements in recognizing a theme must be evident in a single shot rather than a collision of shots. The catch, however, is that the phenomenon chosen to represent a theme should be shot from different angles and perspectives in order to portray the "superficial and the profound interrelationships of actuality". Theme is not, however, a matter of spectatorial interpretation. Rather, it is meant to arrive organically at the conclusion of a given film due exclusively to the control wielded by the director. In a mild critique of DW Griffith's Intolerance, Pudovkin advocated for a shortening of the film in order to crystallize and condense the film's theme. As it was presented, Griffith's film dilutes its own political potential by attempting create visual themes from non-phenomenological concepts. Instead, as Pudovkin elaborated, a filmmaker should choose concepts that are depictable in images rather than language.
• * Analysis takes place when a theme is explored from sufficient perspectives. Analysis is derived by examination of individual shots, but is only relevant when synthesized. Peter Dart, in his description of Pudovkin's concept of analysis, defines it.
• * Identification is the capacity for the audience to fully comprehend the theme of a film. Pudovkin was concerned here with the capacity for spectators to follow his films and hedged against breaks in continuity. As such, identification was mainly concerned with calculating a consistent theme structure and making sure images were smoothly shot and seamlessly edited. Pudovkin achieved both of these tasks by " on action", or editing shots together through a unified movement.
• Affect, Emotion and Pathos – Often used interchangeably by many Soviet filmmakers and theorists, these are the impressions felt by a audience/spectator from a film or parts of a film. The central problem of Eisenstein's book Nonindifferent Nature is the relationship between pathos/affect and the method by which art coaxes it. In the chapter On the Structure of Things, Eisenstein begins with the supposition that represented phenomena depict material elements which explicates a system of structuration between those elements and the phenomena itself. The composition of music is a case-in-point. From the emotional affect of verbalized speech comes the tonal and rhythmic qualities expressed in a given composition. Cinematography generates a similar relational dialectic with images and referents, and through the logic of montage. In short, when one structures the succession of images by its emotional referent, the result is affective moving images. The organic unity of Battleship Potemkin, for example, sustains particular pathos in particular instances. In the "Odessa Steps" scene, dramatic tension rises not from individuated elements, but the organization of elements from natural model of tension. This model, from which Eisenstein theorizes all forms of organic growth and unity, is that of a logarithmic spiral. This spiral, in which the smaller point corresponds to its larger counterpoint in the same ratio that the larger point corresponds to the figure as whole, explains organic growth within nature, the relations of parts to evolutionary growth, and the process by which transformation takes place. Platonic scholars and art theorists have identified this spiral and formula as a central figure of classical beauty. It can located in classical architecture and painting, as well as contemporary photographic composition. For Eisenstein, the capacity for a film to work affectively/emotionally, organic unity must be achieved, the growth of its constituent parts resembling the logarithmic spiral. When organic unity is realized, one can observe clear pathos. Eisenstein defines pathos as "...what forces the viewer to jump out of his seat. It is what forces him to flee from his place. It is what forces him to clap, to cry out. It is what forces his eyes to gleam with ecstasy before tears of ecstasy appear in them. In word, it is everything that forces the viewer to "be beside himself". In the "Odessa Steps" scene, the collision of contrary movements- e.g. up and down stairs, from many guns to one muzzle- exemplifies an organic growth concept, and is informed by the pathos of the shooting; one of horror. The ex stasis is observed in viewers who trace the logic of organic unity- the compositional and narrative growth of the scene- to its foundational pathos. The affective pay-off is a synthesis of a spectator's experience with the radicalized representations on the screen.

Methods

• Attractions – The montage of attractions asserts that an audience is moved emotionally, psychically, and politically by sudden bursts of aggressive movement. Eisenstein adapted this theory from the Proletkult to the cinema in his 1923 essay The Montage of Attractions. Attractions are a molecular unit of a theatrical whole that is independent of narrative and setting. In his 1924 essay The Montage of Film Attractions, Eisenstein makes explicit linkage of film and theater through a common audience. Here, an attraction is "...any demonstrable fact that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that, combined with others, possess the characteristics of concentrating the audience's emotions in any direction dictated by the production's purpose." The intent was to ground attractions in revolutionary ideology in order coax the audience into a sympathetic position.
• Metric – where the editing follows a specific number of frames, cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience. Metric montage was based on the absolute length of shots. The schema of connection is based on the necessity of rapidity. Eisenstein clarifies its implementation by comparing it to beat structures in music, which dictates that structures that fail to follow the "law of prime numbers " are incapable of causing any physiological effect. He favors, instead, very basic and simple beat structures.
• * from Eisenstein's.
• Rhythmic – Rhythmic montage seeks an editorial and compositional relationship in which movements within frames are as important as lengths of shots. The complexity that was cautioned against for metric montage is praised for rhythmic. Since the content of the shot is a dominant element of the shot length, the ascending or descending meter of the shots makes intuitive visual sense.
• * from The Good The Bad and the Ugly where the protagonist and the two antagonists face off in a three-way duel
• * from The Battleship Potemkins "Odessa steps" sequence.
• Tonal – a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots—not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics—to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation.
• * from Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. This is the clip following the death of the revolutionary sailor Vakulinchuk, a martyr for sailors and workers.
• Overtonal/Associational – the overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.
• * from Pudovkin's Mother. In this clip, the men are workers walking towards a confrontation at their factory, and later in the movie, the protagonist uses ice as a means of escape..
• Intellectual – uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning. Intellectual montage seeks to use few images, but images that are rich in cultural, symbolic, and political history. Their collision brings about complex concepts that traditional montage could not achieve. It was at this time that Eisenstein sought to distance filmmaking from an adherence to positivist realism. Intellectual montage sought to present things not as they were, but as they functioned in society. In his examination of Japanese and Chinese language, Eisenstein determined a linguistic link between language and montage. Hieroglyphs endemic to either country's language were highly contextual. The combination of two characters created concepts, but when separated were neutral. The example Eisenstein gives is the combination of the symbols 'eye' and 'water' produce the concept 'crying'. This logic was extended to Japanese Kabuki theater, which used a montage technique of acting, wherein parts of the body were moved in relation and collision to the whole and other parts of the body. Film, similarly, could collide objects within the frame just as readily as it could between frames. Intellectual montage seeks to capitalize on an internal frame as well as the composition and content of the image itself, without sacrificing a dialectical approach, which Eisenstein ultimately concluded was the downfall of Japanese cinema. Intellectual montage was most notably used as a productive model in Eisenstein's The General Line. Here, dominants- shots and elements within the shot that mark the schema of all adjacent shots and elements- are not foregrounded, but delayed in an attempt to mimic musical resonance. Resonances are secondary stimuli that help to highlight the dominant. It is here that one should note the understandable conflation of overtonal and intellectual montage. In fact, overtonal montage is a kind of intellectual montage, since both attempt to elicit complex ideas from the collision of cinematic stimulants.
• * from Eisenstein's and Strike. In Strike, a shot of striking workers being attacked cut with a shot of a bull being slaughtered creates a film metaphor suggesting that the workers are being treated like cattle. This meaning does not exist in the individual shots; it only arises when they are juxtaposed.
• * At the end of Apocalypse Now the execution of Colonel Kurtz is juxtaposed with the villagers' ritual slaughter of a water buffalo.
• Vertical montage focuses on the a single shot or moment, rather than across various shots. Indelibly, vertical montage provides a closer reading of images and their content, as well as permits non-visual phenomena to be considered alongside the image proper.
• * Moving Camera – A dynamic rather than static camera is often used for the same effect as editing. Though not expressly a form of montage, since editing isn't required, a moving camera can cover movement across space continuously. Dynamic action, in which characters or objects move across protracted distances, was the motivating factor in choosing to move the camera. Peter Dart identifies relatively few uses of a moving camera in his analysis of Pudovkin's Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, Storm Over Asia, and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. In all of these films and scenes, the moving camera captures movement. One reason for so few moving shots was that it provided undue continuity and forfeited the discontinuity demanded by the dialectical method of montage. Moving camera and mise en scene culminates in what we call the "Inner Montage".
• * Audio/Visual – The synaesthetic mode, characterised by a total sensory analysis of film, transforms montage from a purely visual category to one incorporating visual and audio elements. This theory's foundation can be seen in Eisenstein's essay "The Fourth Dimension in Cinema", in which Japanese Kabuki Theater and Haiku are examined as in their fragmented totality. Leonard C. Pronko connects Eisenstein's sensory analysis to a formalized synaesthesia. The implication was threefold. First, this grounded montage theory within a non-western language, which gave credibility to Montage Theory as a universal principle. Second, as Steve Odin illustrates, it provided an opening for Japanese art and culture to be examined within a modern context. Lastly, the integration of other senses into the theory of montage laid the groundwork for Montage Theory's persistence throughout historical and technological changes in cinema.

  Intellectual montage

Counter theories and criticism

Other Soviet film theories and practices

Socialist Realism

• Synchronized sound was a contentious issue with Soviet film theorist. Pudovkin railed against its use given its capacity for commodification within capitalist society and, primarily, its propensity to move film toward naturalism. In his reasoning, since sync sound was conditioned to the image, it could only lend itself toward enhanced continuity. Continuity, a process that mitigates the dialectical collision of concepts, would dilute the radical potential of films. Further, any dialectical potential for sound had already been explored in cinema, since musical accompaniment had a well established history by the time synchronized sound had been introduced. However, Pudovkin later reversed his position on sync-sound. Joining Eisenstein and others, Pudovkin came to understand sound not a complementary, but as a counterpoint capable of imbuing films with additional conflictual elements. The inherent tension between this position and the State's mandate for narrative clarity and continuity would be a source of confusion and stagnation for much of this period. Kino-eye took the problem of sound from a documentary/newsreel perspective. In the essays Let's Discuss Ukrainfilm's First Sound Film: Symphony of the Donbas and First Steps Vertov identifies and dismantles the technical, logistical and political hurdles to sync-sound in newsreel cinema. By using his film Enthusiasm, Vertov demonstrated that sound was not only possible, but essential to the evolution of newsreel. Vertv writes
• Narration – Story clarity was an overriding principle of Socialist Realist filmmaking, grounding it in accessibility to a wide array of spectators. According to Vance Kepley Jr., this was a response to the emerging belief that early montage films unnecessarily confined cinema's appeal to highly competent film audiences rather than a general public.
• Hollywood's influence – Over the course of the 1930s, the shift toward Socialist Realism became Party policy and was modeled after Hollywood's popularity with the general public. Ironically, the continuity style that had been the divergent point for Montage Theorists asserted itself as the paramount editing technique of the new Soviet filmmaking mandate. Kepley, in a case study regarding Pudovkin's The Return of Vasilii Bortnikov, explains the narrative, editorial, and compositional influence Hollywood had over Soviet Realist filmmaking at the time. In short, not only did Pudovkin willingly amend the concept of montage to exclude an intellect-centric model to suit audience reception, but was also under strict regulation to meet the Stalinist standard of Socialist Realism that came to define the 1940s and 1950s. Such strict regulation, combined with the presumptive Hollywood model, ultimately led to a dearth of films produced in the subsequent decades in the Soviet Union.

  Kino-eye

• Manifesto – In their introductory statement We: Variant of a Manifesto, Vertov lays the groundwork for Kino-eye's interpretation of cinema and the role of each component of the cinematic apparatus. The manifesto demanded:
• * The death of cinematography "so that the art of cinema may live." Their objection, spelled out in "To Cinematographers – The Council of Three", criticised the old guard of holding to prerevolutionary models which had ceased their useful function. Routine, rooted in the rote reliance on a six-act psychodrama, had doomed film to stagnation. In The Resolution of the Council of Three, April 10, 1923, Kino-eye identified newsreel as the necessary correction to devolution of film practice.
• * The purity of cinema and its undue conflation with other art forms. Here, they are combating a premature synthesis of forms. Theater, which had long been the center of revolutionary art, was condemned for its desperate integration of elemental objects and labors in order to stay relevant. Film, and more specifically newsreel, encountered life as it happened and created synthesis from life, rather than an assemblage of representational objects that approach but never capture life.
• * The exclusion of man as a subject for film and toward a poetry of machines. In a follow up to The Resolution of the Council of Three, April 10, 1923, Kino-eye published an excerpt decrying American cinema's reliance on humanness as a benchmark for filmmaking, rather than treating the camera as an eye itself. "We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera." The reproduction of human perception was the implicit project of film until this point, which Kino-eye saw as a hamstrung endeavor for cinema. Rather than assume the position of humanness, Kino-eye sought to breakdown movement in its intricacies, thereby liberating cinema from bodily limitations and providing the basis from which montage could fully express itself.
• * The determination and essence of systems of movement. Analyzing movement was a step in the reconstitution of the body and the machine. "I am kino-eye, I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people in accordance with preliminary blueprints and diagrams of different kinds. I am kino-eye. From one person I take the hands, the strongest and most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head- and through montage I create a new, perfect man. I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it."
• Radio-pravda was an attempt to record sounds of life. Vertov published Kinopravda & Radiopravda in 1925. In the service of capturing average life, the sounds of life was left unaccounted for in cinema. The integration of audio-visual technologies had already taken place by the time Kino-eye published its statement. The intent was to fully integrate both technologies to be broadcast to a worldwide proletariat audience. "We must prepare to turn these inventions of the capitalist world to its own destruction. We will not prepare for the broadcast of operas and dramas. We will prepare wholeheartedly to give the workers of every land the opportunity to see and hear the whole world in an organized form; to see, hear, and understand one another."
• Critique of Art – Art, as conceptualized in various essays but most explicitly in Kino-Eye, confronts fiction as "Stupefaction and suggestion…" The capacity to critique was thought to reside exclusively within realistic documentation alone. As such, art-drama's weakness was its inability to excite protest; its danger the capacity to deceive like "hypnosis". Kino-eye believed that the illusion created by art-drama could only be combated by consciousness. In section 3, Very Simple Slogans of the Kino-Eye essay, Vertov details the following axioms of Kinoks:
• * "Film-drama is the opium of the people.
• * Down with the immortal kings and queens of the screen! Long live the ordinary mortal, filmed in life at his daily tasks!
• * Down with the bourgeois fairy-tale script! Long live life as it is!
• * Film-drama and religion are deadly weapons in the hands of capitalists. By showing our revolutionary way of life, we will wrest that weapon from the enemy's hands.
• * The contemporary artistic drama is a vestige of the old world. It is an attempt to pour our revolutionary reality into bourgeois molds.
• * Down with the staging of everyday life! Film us as we are.
• * The scenario is a fairy tale invented for us by a writer. We live our own lives, and we do not submit to anyone's fictions.
• * Each of us does his task in life and does not prevent anyone else from working. The film workers' task is to film us so as not to interfere with our work.
• * Long live the kino-eye of proletarian revolution."
• Constructivism and Kino-eye – Though Vertov considered himself a constructivist, his practices and those of Aleskei Gan, perhaps the most vocal of the movement, diverged. Gan and other constructivists took the statements of the Kino-Eye essay to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the worker's purpose and usefulness. While Vertov understood the labor of art to be culprit of mass illusion, to Gan, artistic labor was a highly valuable endeavor with which workers could ultimately dismantle artistry. "Constructivism does not strive to create new types of art. It develops forms of artistic labor through which workers can actually enter into artistic labor without losing touch with their material labor.... Revolutionary Constructivism wrenches photography and cinematography from the hands of art-makers. Constructivism digs art's grave." Gan's film Island of the Young Pioneers follows a community of children who live self-sustaining lives in the countryside. The film, lost or destroyed over time, was produced in the hope of marrying artistic performance and reality in a way that meets the standards of Party leadership and the Socialist Realist movement. The result was a productive process that mirrored the summer camps already enjoyed by many Russian youth of the time. The camera captured Gan's ability to elicit performance as a practice not a product.

"The Dramaturgy of Film Form" ("The Dialectical Approach of Film Form")