And Russian Film Pudovkin a Russian film director once said In every art there must be first a material and secondly a method of composing this material specifically adapted to this art The true art according to Lev ID: 462410
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Slide1
Montage Theory
And Russian Film
Pudovkin
(a Russian film director) once said: “In every art there must be first a material, and secondly, a method of composing this material specifically adapted to this art…” The true art, according to Lev
Kuleshov
comes from putting together the film after it has been planned and filmed. A film edited together differently will have a different result.Slide2
Russian Film School
In Moscow in1919, the government founded a film school called Moscow Film School or VGIK. It was meant to train actors and technicians for the cinema, of course.
It’s the most respected and first of its kind in the world.
The main purpose the government had in making it is to have filmmakers to make propaganda (agitprop) and newsreels or
agitki.Slide3
Lev Kuleshov
and the Kuleshov Effect
He helped establish the Moscow Film School and worked there.
The
Kuleshov Workshop:
focused on
editing. In 1919
his goal was to discover the laws by which film communicates meaning to an
audience.
Part of the Workshop involved using prints of the film Intolerance and watching it over and over again. They even cut up the film and re-edited it in different ways to see if there were different meanings. (They also didn’t have money for film stock.)
They figured out:
1) Shot itself has meaning
2
)
The meaning
it acquires when combined with other shots is
important
You could create metaphors and meanings through montage.
http://www.cleanvideosearch.com/media/action/yt/watch?v=_
gGl3LJ7vHcSlide4
Dziga
Vertov
Dziga
Vertov’s Theory: the movement between shots is most important. He mostly made documentary and other films.
He started as a cameraman and started experimenting with the way a film is put together to see if the meaning changes.
He made documentaries but he experimented with reality and did not really have stories.
His doctrine is called
kino-glaz
or cinema eye.Slide5
Vertov
Continued
Kino-
glaz continued: the purpose is to reveal the truth of everyday experiences.
Can
put shots together into a meaningful
whole
(
montage: the process of organizing shots or sequences
of film)
Three Phases:
1. montage evaluation-select theme by observations 2.montage synthesis-scout locations, plan shots 3. montage-editing by organizing shots with overall themeHis other Theories:Ultimately, making you uncomfortable was also good. Taking a look at things in an unfamiliar way.Also he thought that human vision is flawed. The camera can slow down/ speed up and zoom in/out and such so he uses the term camera-eye to talk about the camera’s eye.Dziga Vertov (1929)- Vertov tried to liberate cinema from theater/literature. Comments on politics-showing poverty, industrialization- compares people with machines. He likes to be self-reflexive and have cameras in shots.Slide6
Sergei Eisenstein’s
Theory
Sergei Eisenstein: Father of montage
His theory was that the content of shots was most important. They must have conflict. And there’s more conflict by putting shots together.
(How is this different from
Vertov
?)
Eisenstein: A+B=X
vs. A=B=AB Euro/U.S.The Psychological school (of thought)- Russian films focused on emotional/psychological conflicts of characters mostly through acting style
Dialectical
montage-conflict between 2 forces "the collision of independent
shots”Elliptical editing/cutting: rapid cutting has meaning so shots are brief but there are more shotsSlide7
The Films
Sergei Eisenstein made:
The
Battleship
Potemkin. He makes political movies mostly. No one main character; it’s a group film. It was made in 1925 but takes place in 1905 when
sailors rebel against their
officers alongside the Russian Revolution. Based on some true events.
Dziga
Vertov made: Man with a Movie Camera in 1929. It shows poverty, class, and life in Russia at the time. It has no story and is considered an avant-garde film. It’s a film about a film and he compares people to machines in it.
Russian film in general: they had an
insistence on sad/tragic
endings but they would have a happy ending if they were exporting it to another country.