George Eisenstein's Montage In Film

Eisenstein’s Montage in Strike

Eisenstein is a man blessed and cursed with an attention to detail. Soviet Cinema is in essence, montage, but how Eisenstein utilizes it to progress an intellectual conversation is much bespoke of montage and its capabilities. Unlike the manipulative montage of Kuleshov, or the relational editing sequence of Pudovkin, Eisenstein uses editing as a sequence of collisions that produce an associative meaning, despite different material (Eisenstein). However, for montage, all other factors are insignificant. What matters is the cut, and how the cut is related to other cuts. The following examples of the hieroglyphs are used by Eisenstein to illustrate a process of meaning generation which can be implemented in cinema

through Eisenstein’s intellectual montage.
eye + water = crying
door + ear = eavesdropping
child + mouth = screaming
mouth + dog = barking
mouth + bird = singing
knife + heart = anxiety Eisenstein concluded from studying hieroglyphs that montage is “an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another”. (95) This description seems to reverse the order in which the process actually unfolds in the spectator’s mind; it is not so much that two separate shots produce a new concept so much as the a priori, or conventionally determined meaning, gives special connotations to the shots which together produce this meaning. Film was art to Eisenstein, and cinema was as much a language as any other. In The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form), Eisenstein goes into depth about a film’s language and its limits. To understand Eisenstein’s perception of montage and of cinema as a whole, you must understand that “art is always conflict” because of its “social mission,” “nature,” and “methodology” (Eisenstein, 24). Just as words form sentences and sentences create novels, in cinema, shots form sequences and sequences form a film. Nevertheless, Eisenstein claims that the root of all cinema rests in the utilization of the shot, elaborating on how shots are “a series of compositional possibilities that develop dialectically from the thesis that the concept of filmic movement derives from the superimposition of…two different stills” (Eisenstein, 34), and that through collision, “these two combined produced dynamisation in space.” This means that Shot A and B will “determine the tension of the movement…Shot A and B are, in terms of material, not identical” (Eisenstein, 36). Eisenstein suggests that two different shots can be identical with association, only with proper detail on editing, framing, and impact of those shots
Strike is not only using montage to progress the narrative, Strike goes beyond narrative editing to make metaphorical and rhetorical statements by means of montage.

Eisenstein was radically more experimental than his contemporaries because in order to practice “intellectual montage”, one must be a practitioner of the avant-garde. Eisenstein’s theory of “collision montage” is that cinema never speaks through a single image, and the juxtaposition of several images act like words in a sentence, or parts of a character in Chinese or Japanese Calligraphy (Pg. 17, Eisenstein). Shots of foreign objects, or inserts, are not meant to contribute to a narrative but to deliver an idea intended by Eisenstein in the sequence. He also claims that montage films are faced “with the task of presenting not only a narrative that is logically connected but one that contains a maximum of emotion and stimulating power.” (Pg. 4, Eisenstein). A scene to illustrate this from Strike would be at the ending of the film where the putting down of the strike by the army is intercut with the footage of a cattle being slaughtered. 
 33. The soldiers’ feet walk away from the camera (seen at a further distance)
 34. The bull’s skin is stripped off. 
 35. 1,500 bodies at the foot of the cliff.
 36. Two skinned bulls’ heads. 
 37. A hand lying in a pool of blood.
The bull doesn’t exist in the narrative but it is used to exemplify killing of the laborers at the hands of the army. Perhaps the scene is Eisenstein

attempting illustrate the brutality of the army, the army is supposed to serve the people but it only serves the bourgeois, the elite minority. This film is propaganda, but due the historical context, that is no surprise. But, the plotline of the scene is beyond negligible. Despite logical assumption, the cow scene is the only one with spatial continuity. If you isolated the scenes of the workers, and put them in chronological order, they would absolutely no sense and absolutely no continuity. However, the cow scene can stand alone. At this point, I realized that I was wrong. Perhaps the workers were not intercut with the cow slaughter. Perhaps the cow slaughter was intercut with the worker. However, the beauty of Eisenstein's method is that, to the certain space, even what is being cut is insignificant. In Eisenstein’s Montage, all that matters is the collision (i.e. A+B=C and B+A=C). Even if the workers were intercut small inserts of the cow slaughter, you still receive the same idea.
Soviet cinema was exactly that, cinema in its rawest form.

Eisenstein took the idea of montage as cinematic language, and essentially went to town with it. And because of this, Eisenstein really pushed the depths of cinema and forced us as the viewer to do the cinematic version of “reading between the

lines”.