During Monday's lecture class, we discussed the development of montage, specifically by the Soviets,
Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Eisenstein. I'm Including a youtube widget here with the clips, and am trying to see if I can also
bring in slides from the lecture to accompany it.
If you mouse over the widget you should get little pop-up thumbnails of all the clips. Navigate through them with the
little arrows to find all of them.
8 comments:
So far, I think the Soviet montage era has to be my favorite. They really broke down the aspects of filming to a science. Their focus relied heavily on the editing which personally I believe is one of the most crucial parts in films. Psychology has always been an interest of mine also and I was pleased to see that they focused on how editing caused emotional responses of the audience. They broke away from the normal editing style and questioned why things were how they were. Although I don't know film history beyond this point yet, I feel that the soviet montage era can be compared to the scientific revolution due to how both questioned the ways of how the world or film world works and developed their own theories. Shots were played around with and flipped and played back to back. This I believe is one of the best ways to learn and master something, by playing with it and trying different things all the time.
A Man with a Movie Camera is one of my favorite types of movies. It is not character or plot based. It is a movie about all the different kinds of things that can be done with film. The sound track goes great with the editing and I still have that first song stuck in my head. Without knowing that montage and juxtaposition had really been done in movies before this makes it look like a present day edited movie. However, this is not the case as this movie really used montage to the fullest. Right off the bat of watching the movie they used a metric, rhythmic, and a tonal montage in that order.
The movie showed us that depending on what shots come before or after a specific shot, a different connection is made in our brain that would not have been made if we had seen the shots by themselves.
The movie had a couple scenes with stop motion photography which were really cool. They made it look like a camera was attaching it self to a tripod and the tripod legs were extending and retracting to like it was dancing. The creator was showing off all his skills with a video camera.
The movie was drawing a lot of parallels between what the film industry is and other things that the filmmaker thought were similar in life (such as the cigarette industry). This movie was a big leap in cinematography and showed that the video camera has a lot more potential than realized.
This era sparked the start of smart filmmaking. People behind the camera began to realize the power behind the medium. Using camera and editing to evoke emotions and responses from films to its audience. Many soviet filmmakers shot montage films, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, but it was Sergei Eisenstein who really took another meaning to montage. He felt that montage was the way individual shots "collide" with one another. In this thinking he discovered that although the shots are in a sequence it does not mean the next shot will correspond with the one before it, rather that it would be on top of the other. In a man with a movie camera I felt the director, Dziga Vertov, really portrayed this idea of montage using many different methods of cinematography. Through out the film he used split screens, multiple exposures, slow motion, photo frames, quick cuts, close-ups, tracking shots, and animations to break up the footage. I though that this film was brilliant for its time. The music along with the film brings it to life. I found myself assuming a sort of story-line or targeted emotion from certain scenes of the film.
My only complaint was the reuse of music, but in further research I found that this was played back to a number of songs over the years. This kind of editing brought a whole new world to filmmaking, and a new way to look at our world for the audience.
Like some of my other brilliant classmates have discussed the Soviet montage era seemed to be the imitations of a heightened sense of creating films. I like how Matt put it, “people behind the camera began to realize the power behind the medium.” Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov were intellectuals and put their instincts and ideas to the camera. It is amazing the foresight they had to realize the power of cinema. While the Soviets saw the power of cinema in the editing, using elliptical cutting instead of the continuity system, they did not overlook the importance of camerawork. The Soviets realized that getting the right shot enhanced the future editing techniques. All the Soviet montage artists had varying theories and opinions, but they all respected each other and applied them to similar themes. Pudovkin and Kuleshov were more conservative in nature and Eisenstein used collision, but they all adapted these techniques to movies about revolution. The Soviet montage seemed to focus on a narrative of social forces, the source of causes and effects and there was less play on central characters.
While the preceding directors were more conventional, the director (Vertov) of whom we viewed the video in class was more radical. Vertov seemed to push the limits of what montage could accomplish. He saw the camera as the physical entity of the eye and used it to view events and how the brain reacts to what they just seen. For instance, in his film, The Man with the Movie Camera, depicted an audience watching a “documentary” about the making of the movie. The movie created an underlying theme of everyday life is like creating a movie. There are certain aspects of life that are directly related to film and there is nothing film cannot capture. It can capture any emotion, any event, real or staged. Intercutting became the basis for most of the montage films and intercutting certain images could relate a feeling unto the audience. They took careful notice to every aspect of the shot in order to put their theories about film into effect.
What the Soviets were able to accomplish in this era was profound. While some directors could have been using their techniques unknowingly, the Soviets mastered it and were able to convey much more complex situations. In most of the films, like Mother and Potemkin they used montage to show shooting to death. I do not know if they chose to do this because they did not have the technology to show a realistic death, but it still demonstrates the power because a person cannot actual die but you feel like they did. I think today they tend to show too much, a director does not have to show everything for shock value to get the same point across. What I really can take away from this era is the fact that directors were aware that the audience would realize what they were trying to convey, I never looked so deeply into it, I just would conjecture it was the most effective way to capture the shot. From now on when I view movies I will be aware of hidden messages the director could be commenting on by the way he inter cuts this film.
The Soviet Montage era truly pushed filmic storytelling to a new level. All aspects of the the medium were being explored and perfected.
After viewing some of his films, I would consider Sergei Eisenstein a maverick of the early film world. His montages explored the potential of film making on a deeper level than any of his predecessors. For example, he experimented with underlying messages and how to convey mood with innovative editing and shot techniques.
Vertov, in my opinion, explored the art of shooting and editing with brilliance and persistent creativity. Man with a movie camera was significantly more advanced than what I expected from a movie of this era.
Upon reflection, I believe the era of the Soviet Montage should be considered a revolution in film making. Boundaries were being pushed on all fronts. In turn, when comparing these films to those which preceded them, the predecessors seem obsolete.
Well, Man with a Movie Camera is so far my least favorite film. I certainly agree that the cinematography was beautiful and that it played an important role in the development of that field, I just feel that it dragged and was remarkably slow paced and didn't really hold the viewers interest. It is clear that this film must have played a formative role in the development of cinematography as a profession and that it could serve as a landmark in that field of some absolutely stunning work.
However, content wise, I truly did not enjoy the film . It dragged on and on and the fact that it was silent for the most part didn't help me maintain focus and a real desire to watch the aforementioned film. All the same, as previously stated, I can certainly see the allure behind the film, I would just prefer not to watch it again any time in the foreseeable future.
'Man With a Movie Camera' was peculiar to say the least, at the beginning of the movie I completely believed that I could understand what was happening. After several minutes however it was hard to tell the difference between what I perceived to be the meaning of the shot, and what meaning the director intended for the audience. Times have changed and it is sometimes hard for modern generations to comprehend a scene completely.
There was no attainable plot behind the various shots and would be considered a montage. Vertov used frequent examples of a double exposure, which worked well for the time period. There also were no actors and the close ups he showed aimed to evoke emotion from the viewer. This film gives us a unique perspective of life on any regular day.
Post a Comment