Introduction
In the presented essay I will compare the style of work of selected artists in the montage of the film. I will try to point out some general regularities and features of Soviet cinema. At the same time I will try to capture especially what is common in their systems and similar or conversely what differ. For my analysis, I will draw on the feature films of the Soviet avantgarde, namely these are the movies - The Battleship Potemkin (S. Eisenstein, 1925), Mother (V. Pudovkin, 1926) and The Man with a movie camera (D. Vertov, 1929).
The School of montage
Most of the films that they were created in the Soviet Union, outside the school of montage, use topics of sitcoms and to a various literary adaptations. Conversely directors from school of montage decided on a topic related to the uprising, or other historically revolutionary movement. This was mainly the one that these topics offered filmmakers show any conflict, or also because they tried to point out the Communist ideology. Especially Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin used this style, in the films that remind the twentieth anniversary of the failed revolution of 1905.
Montage is from the beginning of the twenties characterized as a process of synthesis, building something new and in terms of the physical planes also something quite simple. Most montage’s films were created as a dialectical process, where initially from a two meanings of consecutive shots form a third meaning.
Movies of Soviet school are also movies of mass heroes. Characters act and react, but they are not expressions of individuals, but rather of a certain social class. One person can represent the whole class. Eisenstein, for example, in the film The Battleship Potemkin completely elimin...
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...d not, however, only significant events, he stops at the store, or while remains on a field. Vertov was not hiding behind anything that might lead to the idea that all displayed events are not depend on many filmmaking techniques, on the contrary, it explicitly he makes clear. The film ends with the final image of the city that sleeps again, the image transferred to canvas and ends projection.
Works Cited
David Bordwell. The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film. – Cinema Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1972, 9-17.
Richard Taylor. Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. – London, 1979, 81-91.
Vsevolod Pudovkin. From Film Technique. On Editing, 121 – 126.
PŁAŻEWSKI, Jerzy; TABERY, Karel. Dějiny filmu : 1895-2005. Vyd. 1. Praha : Academia, 2009. s.79.
SADOUL, Georges. Dějiny světového filmu : od Lumiera až do současné doby. Vyd. 2. Praha : Orbis, 1963. s.156.
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Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein argues that the basis of cinema is dialectical montage. In his article “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form”, Eisenstein explains dialectics as “a constant evolution from the interaction of two contradictory opposites” (45). These opposites synthesize and form a new thesis, which then may also be contradicted. Eisenstein employs dialectical montage in his films due to its ability to invoke change, an important goal in a revolutionary society. His film Battleship Potemkin is designed to display this theory and create a psychological change within his audience, corresponding to his revolutionist ideals.
In the film V for Vendetta the director James Mcteigue uses a range of different film techniques in order to gain the audience's attention and to make the movie more interesting. The four film techniques I’m going to focus on in this essay are editing, music, camera angles and the lighting. I am going to do this by analysing the ‘Domino Montage’ scene.
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Gunning, Tom 2000, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early film, its spectator, and the avant-garde.” Film and theory: An anthology, Robert Stam & Toby Miller, Blackwell, pp 229-235.
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