Today’s Film 103 session was history heavy but extremely interesting. Soviet Montage was our topic and we looked at how innovative the soviet methods of filmmaking were for the time. We looked at Eisenstein and Kuleshov and how ground breaking their work was for the time, linked to the first film school ever, based in Moscow after the new soviet government decided to fund the art of film to appeal to the West – I hadn’t really realised before that at the time, Russia was a real hub for film. Eisenstein in particular was very interesting to study, especially when he used ‘Intellectual Montage’, where a viewer is given more freedom to interpret what is being shown on screen.
After some discussion over the subject, we spent the latter part of the session watching Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’ and made observations on the way it was put together. The observation I made first was on just how many shots are used to create the story, there were so many shots, including some repetitions to highlight certain moments of action. Many of these shots were close ups and/or shot from unusual angles. These elements made the film very intense and overwhelming. Another interesting thing I learnt was that many of the characters on screen, mainly the sailors on the ship, were not played by professional actors but by real people. For example, some were real soldiers and sailors. I liked this as it helped give authenticity to the faces of the characters and therefore also to the story. The film had many interesting examples of ‘Intellectual Montage’ including one example in the scene where the innocent citizens are being shot at on the steps by the Cossacks. Eisenstein put together images of a mother’s distressed face as she was dying, an image of a bloody swan belt buckle and images of a pram wheel about to fall down the steps. A comment that I believe is linked to the idea that society under the tsar was also affecting the future of Russia as well as it’s present.
This is another image I found that explores Soviet Montage:
PCA Isobel Wilkinson - BA Film 