Two revolutions-1917.
Civil unrest caused by government corruption, food shortages.
Revolt led to forcing the abdication of Nikolai II.
New government, never mind here comes the radical Bolsheviks. Lead by Vladimir Lenin.
Russian Revolution = More propaganda.
After revolution, filmmakers experimented with footage from old films, cut then together to make montages.
Lenin believed film could instruct the illiterate masses and he established workshops to determine the best methods for shaping film into instruction and propaganda.
Levv Kuleshov studied the techniques of Hollywood directors particularly D.W Griffith. He introduced cross-cutting and montage to Russian Cinema.
He used the archives of silent film and destroyed most in the process during his experiments.
Kuleshov found people would respond to a shot differently depending on what images came before on after the shot.
Sergei Eisenstein's innovative film style was heavily influenced by cultural currents that emerged after the Russian Revolutions.
Designed propaganda posters to keep up morale while in the Red Army.
He attended Kuleshov's workshop.
His methods of montage:
- Metric-Based purely on timing/number of frames
- Rhythmic-Cutting for continuity or by the content/movement within the frame
- Tonal-Includes the tones of shot (lighting/shapes/shadows) The content of the visuals influence the emotional response.
- Overtonal-Combination of metric, rhythmic and tonal.
- Intellectual-Where the above methods seek to evoke emotional responses, intellectual seeks to express ideas by creating relationships between opposing visual images.
Dziga Vertov worked as a newsreel camerman, coined the term Kino Eye (Film eye).
Believed the world is seen more clearly through the eye of the camera than the human eye and cinema should be real and truthful.
He disagreed with Eisenstein's theory of narrative film making, He believed conventional fiction story telling to be corrupting.
Cut film images together due to thematic connections or emotional effects of juxtaposition.
Attempted to create a unique language of cinema, trying to create real life cinema.
frentic montage style was unmatched until the era of the music video
His work and theories influenced by the documentary realism in the 1960's.
Man with a movie camera (1929)
Experiments with jump cuts, superimposition's, split screen, stop motion and camera angles.
Vertov created one of the earliest Russian animations-Soviet Toys.
Vsevolod Pudovkin theorised the actors on screen do not really act, its there relationship and relationship to the exterior objects that moves us.
"The lens of the camera replaces the eye of the observer, and the changes of angle of the camera-directed now on one person, now on another, now on detail, now on another must be subject to the same conditions as those of the eyes of the observer"
Believed that montage operated differently from the way Eisenstein conceived it-that montage was not a collision of frames, but a linkage of frames.
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