Battleship Potemkin is an iconic Soviet Montage-style film by Sergei Eisenstein. Montage, according to Pudovkin, is “a dynamic, often discontinuous way of narrative editing.” Soviet Montage-style is oftentimes characterized by fast cuts and short individual shots. Just like French Impressionism and German expressionism, there are theories and social contexts that support this cinematic style. The Kuleshov effect describes that the impact of an earlier shot on the latter is more than just their sum, as people will use their own imaginations to fill the gap between the shots. There are, however, different takes on montage. While Kuleshov believes shots are combined for clarity and higher expression, just like bricks that are piled up to build houses, Eisenstein emphasizes the contrast and conflict between shots more than their linkage. Collision, Eisenstein believes, creates exciting moments that arouse strong emotions in spectators. Therefore, physical conflict becomes a major theme of Soviet Montage films, depicting uprisings, strikes and clashes of the revolutionary period. In the meantime, there also exists this notion of intellectual cinema that utilizes fast-paced, emotionally-charged Montage-style editing to convey abstract ideas and sociopolitical realities to Soviet audiences.
The main stylistic elements that distinguish the Montage style lie in editing. Unlike conventional continuity editing which emphasizes the smooth flow of movements, montage films often involve actions that are broken down into multiple shots. One way to do so is overlapping editing, where the second shot repeats part of the action from the previous shot. For instance, from 0:22 to 0:42 in Battleship Potemkin, there is a repetition of two continuous shots of people rushing down the stairs followed by a close-up scene of a man on his knees and another shot of the constant movement of the crowd on the stairs. It is not hard to tell that all three scenes actually happen at the same time and involve same group of people as you can see the same figure in white that runs across the crowd from the left end of the stairs to the right. They are merely shot from a different camera angle. Repetitions expand the time an action would take on-screen and thus increase the intensity of the action. Here, the tragic scene of civilians escaping from gunfire is elongated to demonstrate the cruelness of government and the helplessness of unarmed civilians. Another cutting technique, elliptical cutting, creates the opposite effect. For instance, from 1:26 to 2:02, there contains a scene of a young mother who finds her little boy lying on the stairs being run over by the crowd. The cuts move swiftly back and forth between the boy lying on the ground, the moving crowd and the mother’s face. The boy’s dead body is shown multiple times from different angles, as is the mother’s face. However, the process in which the mother walks towards her boy and picks him off the ground is completely left out and replaced by a series of intercuttings.
In the article A Dialectic Approach to Film Form, Eisenstein describes conflict as the fundamental principal art. Particularly, in the art of film, while temporal gaps and conflicts are achieved by the elongated or shortened action on-screen, the spacial conflict is achieved by striking graphic contrasts from shot to shot. This clip as a whole, is made up of shots cutting back and forth between objects in rapid motion intertwined by static figures. The function of a camera, and the function of editing in Soviet montage films go way beyond the “common” notions from cinema of attraction, where exaggerated shots are edited independently and visual conflicts are often demonstrated within an individual shot. In montage films, active camera work and rapid cuts work along with static images. Through conflict between shots, the result oftentimes yields dynamism, as put forward by Eisenstein.
Soviet montage as a film style has expanded the capacity of higher-order expression achieved by cinematic works. Through the conflicts between matters and both their spatial and temporal nature, montage demonstrated a whole new dimension of approach to conventional cinema.
The main stylistic elements that distinguish the Montage style lie in editing. Unlike conventional continuity editing which emphasizes the smooth flow of movements, montage films often involve actions that are broken down into multiple shots. One way to do so is overlapping editing, where the second shot repeats part of the action from the previous shot. For instance, from 0:22 to 0:42 in Battleship Potemkin, there is a repetition of two continuous shots of people rushing down the stairs followed by a close-up scene of a man on his knees and another shot of the constant movement of the crowd on the stairs. It is not hard to tell that all three scenes actually happen at the same time and involve same group of people as you can see the same figure in white that runs across the crowd from the left end of the stairs to the right. They are merely shot from a different camera angle. Repetitions expand the time an action would take on-screen and thus increase the intensity of the action. Here, the tragic scene of civilians escaping from gunfire is elongated to demonstrate the cruelness of government and the helplessness of unarmed civilians. Another cutting technique, elliptical cutting, creates the opposite effect. For instance, from 1:26 to 2:02, there contains a scene of a young mother who finds her little boy lying on the stairs being run over by the crowd. The cuts move swiftly back and forth between the boy lying on the ground, the moving crowd and the mother’s face. The boy’s dead body is shown multiple times from different angles, as is the mother’s face. However, the process in which the mother walks towards her boy and picks him off the ground is completely left out and replaced by a series of intercuttings.
In the article A Dialectic Approach to Film Form, Eisenstein describes conflict as the fundamental principal art. Particularly, in the art of film, while temporal gaps and conflicts are achieved by the elongated or shortened action on-screen, the spacial conflict is achieved by striking graphic contrasts from shot to shot. This clip as a whole, is made up of shots cutting back and forth between objects in rapid motion intertwined by static figures. The function of a camera, and the function of editing in Soviet montage films go way beyond the “common” notions from cinema of attraction, where exaggerated shots are edited independently and visual conflicts are often demonstrated within an individual shot. In montage films, active camera work and rapid cuts work along with static images. Through conflict between shots, the result oftentimes yields dynamism, as put forward by Eisenstein.
Soviet montage as a film style has expanded the capacity of higher-order expression achieved by cinematic works. Through the conflicts between matters and both their spatial and temporal nature, montage demonstrated a whole new dimension of approach to conventional cinema.
