Soviet Montage
- Battleship Potemkin released in 1925 was commissioned to commemorate the abortive 1905 revolution; the mutiny of the battleship in 1905 was a "central metaphor for the October Revolution of 1917."
- Eisenstein's film "made any number of artists and intellectuals of the 1920s sit up and take notice of the movies as an art form."
- Lenin in 1925 "decided to permit increased freedom in the arts, and the Soviet cinema opened up and began to explore new possibilities. Thereafter, through the final years of the silent era the USSR became one of the most important and influential filmmaking nations in the world."
- By the mid-1920s all studios, including Goskino, renamed Sovkino in 1925 where Eisenstein worked, "finally had the resources to begin to assemble staffs of directors, cinematographers, editors, and other needed personnel."
- Eisenstein argued that "the maximum effect could be gained only if the shots did not fit together smoothly, but instead jolted the spectator." = intellectual montage
- Soviet Montage "used the power of editing to manipulate the emotions of the spectator" and rather than narrative structure or character development "they stressed social forces as the root causes of change in people's lives."
- Soviet typage "focused on stature and gestures" of the people of the proletariat, rather than famous stars.
- The Odessa steps massacre was filmed as "a single event to symbolize the hopes, triumphs, sufferings, and ultimate failure of the revolution."
- Long shots convey confusion and alarm, intercut with "eyes of terror, lips in silent scream, feet stumbling, a bouquet crushed, a broken umbrella, and a woman losing her baby carriage."
- 5 kinds of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, intellectual.
- Metric montage: editing tempo increased as massacre intensified.
- Rhythmic montage: military order of the steady marching soldiers is in dramatic contrast to the disorder of the fleeing crowd.
- Tonal montage: conflicting intersecting planes and masses and shadows of soldiers' rifles and uniforms intersect the light reflecting off fleeing citizens.
- Intellectual montage: end sequence of battleship firing 3 times; 3 images of marble lions - the first sleeping, the second waking, the third rising - appear as a single beast, "aroused as the Russian masses will be ten years later against czarist oppression."
- This experimental film released early 1926 was denounced as too "formalist" but Eisenstein was a "radical" filmmaker developing a new language of the cinema, was "the cinema's first major theoretician."
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