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BSA106 Russian Montage.

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 Sergei Eisenstein.
Eisenstein's film style emerged as a result of the Russian Revoloutions, during which he had designed propaganda posters. He was taught in Kuleshov's workshops, but he advanced Kuleshov's techniques. 
He split montage into five different ways; Metric (each shot is timed), Rhythmic (each shot is timed according to the rhythm of what is in the shot), Tonal (cutting in order to generate an emotional connection), Overtonal (Using a combination of the previous three) and intellectual (Put a third shot after two previous shots to create meaning)
Examples of Eisenstein's films would be "Strike"(1925) and "The Battleship Potemkin"(1925). Many examples of Eisenstein's use of montage can be seen in the famous step scene in "The Battleship Potemkin". 
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Dziga Vertov. 
Dziga Vertov was a newsreel cameraman who coined the term 'Kino eye' or 'film eye'. He thought that the camera could capture more than the eye alone who considered the camera to be an instrument that could be used to explore the actual happenings of human life. He believed that everything that the camera filmed should be real and truthful and should be free from theatricality and artificial light and studio staging. He disliked fiction in film and considered fiction in film to be corrupting. 
His montage shots were so quick that the style was unmatched until music videos and he experimented with slow motion, camera angles, enlarged close-ups, cross cutting for comparisons and attaching cameras to moving vehicles like locomotives, motorbikes, and other moving objects. 

An example of Vertov's films would be "A Man With A Movie Camera" (1929).
He was also one of the first Russian animators. One of his animations was, "Soviet toys".

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Vsevolod Pudovkin. 
Pudovkin believed that actors didn't actually act, it is the context that they are put in that moves us. He believed that the power of editing was what truly made the actors look as though they were acting.
He used many new techniques masterfully such as:

  • Contrast, where he cut between contrasting scenarios. This technique can be seen in "The Godfather" where it cuts between the baptism and the brutal murders of five men to show the boss' hypocrisy. 
  • Parallelism, where a connection is made between different things. This can be seen in the opening scene of "Hugo" where the mechanical workings of a clock fades into the streets of Paris as they have similar visual appearances. 
  • Symbolism is also used. This is where something is used as a metaphor for something else. 
  • Similarity/crosscut, where two different shots switch between one another, showing two different perspectives in order to build tension for the audience. 
  • Leit motif's were also used, these were re-occurring shots or scenes that have meaning on a larger scale. 




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