Soviet montage

What is Montage?

Improvement of skill overtime in a character

Montage meant making a film out of many different shots, angles, lighting as well as editing. As you can already tell the soviet montage also did a lot of experimenting with camera angles and lighting.

Russian Revolution in 1997, the Bolsheviks overthrew communism. They filmed new mediums that could communicate to the masses, they also used propaganda to explain their ideas of the Communist party. They also showed it in films, film was very new at this point. They realised how film was a mass media which could we used to communicate the message out.

I think that that soviet montage was a mix of The New French Wave as well as German expressionism.

How did the film theory develop?

They started film schools in Moscow, their aim was to train film makers to produce propaganda agitprop films, however lack of available film stock led them to re edit the film as an experiment, rather than shooting their own material. Lev Kuleshov who studied films in detail became extremely interested in the montage (editing) as a way of editing. He experimented by editing shots in different ways to see how they changed the meanings in films.

This is different to the New French Wave and German Expressionism as they did not have special film schools like the Soviet Montage did. This makes the industry sound very professional and experienced.

Kuleshov Effect

He showed people a video where he showed a man with the same expression, he cut to shots of food, a little girl in a coffin and woman laying on a couch.

He then showed the shots put in different ways; each showed a different scenario even though the man had that one same express on his face. He discovered how editing can change the whole meaning of a scene.

How was montage used to create agitprop?

Cinema was silent at this time, so they had to communicate without dialogue, montage helped them do that.

Subtitles did not work either as most people were illiterate. Sergei Eisenstein, Russian film director and theorist who discovered that editing can be used to play with how long a film, or a scenario can be. In his concept of film montage, images, perhaps independent of the “main” action, are presented for maximum psychological impact.

This helped giving meaning to different shots and scenes. Additionally, the actors had to show more emotions.

The Five types of Montage

Metric montage ->here they cut shots according to the number of frames, no matter what is happening in the shot leaving. Therefore, shortening the shots abbreviated the time the audience had to absorb the information in each shot.

Rhythmic montage -> here they cut shots according to the content of the scene. This helped them create a smooth visual continuity between shots.

Tonal montage -> here they cut shots according to the emotional tone of the shots, so shots of a sleeping baby suggests a calm tone which also meant that they did not have to cut shots many times.

Over tonal montage -> this was basically a term used to use the previous cuts to make a sequence (scene).

Intellectual Montage -> here they used images which were not related to the continuity, but they were used to suggest ideas and concepts for later.

Overall, as I said before the soviet montage was a mix of German Expressionism and The New French Wave, as they had that professionalism as well the psychological thinking towards the audience. They also liked to experiment with shots and editing mainly.