Soviet montage cinema12/7/2023 ![]() During the civil war years, the Red Army created an ideal breeding ground for cinema. Soviet montage owes as much to Dziga Vertov and his Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) newsreels and the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, who would build upon Kuleshov’s discoveries. The combination of images in each scenario will communicate an entirely different message and effect on the viewer. It involves the arrangement of various shots which, although supposedly unrelated to each other, represent an idea and generate a certain dramatic effect when combined in a specific way.įor instance, if we take a close-up of a serious person and another shot of the same person smiling, we can insert a different shot between them for example, of a young person descending from a train, or a sleeping baby, or some workers placing red banners on a factory entrance. But Soviet montage, the great contribution of the Russian Revolution, represented a revolutionary development that has remained fundamental to cinema up to the present day. Prior to Kuleshov’s experiments, cinematic editing had developed into a language, albeit in a linear direction. Montage examples from the Odessa steps scene in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Nowadays, it is common in cinema to speak of the Kuleshov effect. Vsevolod Pudovkin, a contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein and director of many acclaimed revolutionary films, was Kuleshov’s most notable student and follower. Nevertheless, filmmaker and cinema scholar Lev Kuleshov was able to make his initial contributions to the development of “montage” through his experimentation with stock footage. At times, funds did not even extend far enough to buy film stock. Under a working-class government, Russia created the world’s first film school. Soviet montage: the Russian Revolution’s contribution to cinemaĬzarism and capitalism had been done away with, and there was an atmosphere of freedom in the streets that was reflected by artists and their work. Cinema, which achieved little development under czarism, would rise to great heights. There were radical new advancements in every artistic discipline. In these conditions, a galaxy of artists and talented individuals flourished, and society took advantage of this. The revolution attracted the best of the intelligentsia, with the youth at the forefront. Children with empty stomachs went to school for the first time, although those schools were unfurnished, and every five schoolchildren had to share a pencil between them. The revolution was not able to prioritize art in its early years, and yet from the outset, it sought to bring the masses out of their state of backwardness, starting with education. ![]() Deep economic hardship from the early years of the revolution accompanied this legacy of immense cultural backwardness. 80% of people between 8 and 50 years old were illiterate and in Central Asia, many languages did not even have a written alphabet. This transformation had to contend with a colossal cultural lag: the Russian masses lived under enormous exploitation and cultural underdevelopment. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the greatest transformation mankind has yet undergone. Despite being cut short by the Stalinist degeneration of the regime, the legacy of October in the field of filmmaking continues to be felt to this day. The Russian Revolution ushered in a flowering of creative expression in all the arts, but particularly cinema, which was advanced to new heights by the likes of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who regarded film as a weapon of class struggle.
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