Sunday, October 26, 2014

Assignment 7: Theories of Montage


Eisenstein's lack of affection for the continuity editing of the D.W. Griffith school of film are shown in the famous Odessa steps sequence. The Odessa steps wouldn't take as long as it took in the film to go down on. That tells you that Eisenstein wasn't interested in the geography and the characters' spatial relation. He was interested in juxtapositions of different shots to engage a person simultaneously on an intellectual and an emotional level.

You can see the exploitative level in which Eisenstein cuts the film. You see a child fall and see him bloody, after that he screams out for his mom which is meant to manipulate the viewer in the cheapest way, but it obviously worked. Also in John Hess's Filmmaker IQ video about Soviet Montage he explains the Marxist Dialectic way that Eisenstein was going for in his theory of editing. You see soldiers marching down steps and cut to people running away down the steps and you get the idea of "Oppression" into your mind.

After that the Battleship Potemkin that was mutinied by the oppressed shoots the Odessa theater and it cuts to 3 different shots of stone lions that are progressively rising up to portray the proletariat rising to revolt against the Tsarist government. That sequence obviously doesn't have any continuity but gives you an abstract idea if you think about it. This is how Soviet montage was used because they lack a narrative momentum and have to do with ideas. Joseph Goebbels loved the film as a propaganda piece and was very influential in his involvement with the propaganda agency of the Third Reich.

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