Soviet montage theory

• 1. Introduction

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  Soviet montage theory has a founding story that begins with a bowl of soup. In an experiment by the filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, the actor Ivan Mosjoukine's neutral face was joined to a bowl of soup, a baby in a coffin, and a woman on a sofa. Audiences read the same blank expression differently depending on which image came next. That small trick grew into the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to world cinema. The word montage is French for assembly or editing. Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s agreed that editing mattered enormously, yet they fought over what it actually was. Was cutting a way to build ideas by addition, or by collision? Could a film be made from life itself, with no script at all? What happened to the theory when the Soviet state began demanding clear, simple stories? And how did a method designed to provoke revolution end up compressing time in everyday popular films? The answers run through a handful of rival filmmakers, a few famous scenes, and one stubborn argument about where a film's meaning comes from.

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• 2. Collision Not Continuity

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  Sergei Eisenstein called montage "the nerve of cinema" in his essay "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form". He added that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema". Soviet filmmakers disagreed about the details, but this was a point on which they all nodded.

  Eisenstein's own definition has outlasted the rival versions. In his words, "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots." Each element, he said, is perceived "not next to the other, but on top of the other". The force of a film, on this view, comes from how shots are edited and not only from what each shot contains.

  Alfred Hitchcock often stressed the pivotal role of editing in filmmaking. Steve Odin traces the underlying idea back even further, to Charles Dickens, who used it to follow parallel action across a narrative. Vsevolod Pudovkin went so far as to claim that words were thematically inadequate for cinema, even though silent films relied on intertitles to link their shots.

  Continuity editing is montage's closest rival, and it also treats cutting as the engine of narrative film. The difference lies in what the cutting serves. Continuity stays subordinate to a predetermined story. Montage instead holds that colliding images create meaning, so it cares less about the script than about the associations between shots.

  The 180 degree rule shows what continuity wants. A director imagines a straight line through a scene, and keeping the camera on one side of it makes shot-reverse shot exchanges easy to follow. Montage may borrow such devices but is not bound by them. Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera follows people at work and leisure in many parts of the Soviet Union, and it never gives priority to continuity of action.

  The theorists also borrowed a structure from Karl Marx, the dialectic, in which a thesis meets an antithesis and produces a synthesis. A thesis might be a social harmony shown on screen, or simply an opening shot. The antithesis is where Eisenstein and Pudovkin parted ways. For Eisenstein it negates the thesis. For Pudovkin it adds to it, so that meaning accumulates over the course of a film instead of multiplying through conflict.

  Pudovkin explained his approach in his book Film Technique. He argued that a film's theme should be fully visible in a single shot, which should then be filmed from different angles and perspectives. He illustrated this with a street demonstration. A spectator on the ground sees only a small piece of it, and one on a rooftop cannot read the banners. A filmmaker can edit several viewpoints together and turn the spectator into an observer.

  To keep the theme unbroken, Pudovkin favored what he called cutting on action, joining two shots through one continuing movement.

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• 3. The Kuleshov Group

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  The Kuleshov Group, made up of Lev Kuleshov and his students, set out to isolate the essence of cinema. Their first results kept circling the same ingredients. Competent acting, striking lighting, and elaborate scenery all turned out not to be intrinsic to film.

  The breakthrough came from comparing two films, "an American and a comparable Russian one". The American film struck the group as extraordinary because its average shot was so short. They inferred that audiences found that arrangement of shots perceptually appealing. Lengthy shots, as in the Russian film, made it harder for viewers to mentally interpret a pattern.

  In 1916, Kuleshov published an essay in Vestnik Kinematografii, where he first used the term montage to describe how one shot follows another. Many scholars consider his work the basis from which all later montage theory is derived. The experiment from the opening of this documentary was read as proof of cinema's unique power to draw reactions from the relationship between images. It was also taken to show that montage is dialectical, and that combining images produces specific political meanings.

  Kuleshov himself was more cautious than his followers. He held that montage makes cinema possible but matters less than performance, which he treated as a kind of internal montage. He also saw montage as subservient to whoever deploys it. When he compared Russian, European, and American films made before the Russian Revolution, he could find no unifying theory among them. He settled on a relativistic approach resembling later auteur theories.

  He also saw a practical danger in worshipping the cut. If montage is everything, actors begin to look unconvincing, because they come to believe too strongly in their own importance.

  The classic experiment has since come under direct attack. In The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment, Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley call Kuleshov's findings unscientific and a product of cinematic myth. Their verdict is that the effect "may tell us little about film or visual communication, but its lingering power tells us a lot about the symbolic uses of the past."

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• 4. Ways to Cut

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  In 1923, Eisenstein carried an idea from the Proletkult theater into film with his essay "The Montage of Attractions". A year later, in "The Montage of Film Attractions", he tied film to theater through their shared audience. He defined an attraction as "any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination, and so on)" that reliably affects the audience's attention and emotions. The goal was to steer that audience toward a sympathetic position grounded in revolutionary ideology.

  From there, Eisenstein and his peers sorted montage into types. Metric montage cuts after a set number of frames, regardless of what is happening in the image. It aims at the most basic emotional responses. Eisenstein compared it to musical beats and favored very simple patterns such as 3:4, 2:4, and 1:4. His film October offers an example.

  Rhythmic montage pays attention to movement inside the frame as well as the length of shots. The complexity that metric montage avoided is welcome here, because the content of a shot helps decide how long it should last. A three-way duel in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly works this way, as does the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin.

  Tonal montage goes further and uses the emotional meaning of the shots themselves. A sleeping baby, for instance, suggests calm. Eisenstein's example comes from Battleship Potemkin, right after the death of the revolutionary sailor Vakulinchuk, who became a martyr for sailors and workers.

  Overtonal, or associational, montage combines the metric, rhythmic, and tonal approaches into a more abstract effect. Pudovkin's Mother supplies an example. Workers walk toward a confrontation at their factory, and later in the film the protagonist uses ice as a means of escape.

  Camera movement was a related but separate tool. Peter Dart found surprisingly few moving shots in Pudovkin's Mother of 1926, The End of St. Petersburg of 1928, Storm Over Asia of 1928, or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin of 1925. Where the camera did move, it followed real movement across space. Too much of it would also have supplied unwanted continuity and erased the discontinuity that dialectical montage required.

  In 1929, Eisenstein pushed toward intellectual montage and tried to pull filmmaking away from positivist realism. The aim was to show things as they functioned in society and not simply as they appeared. His study of Japanese and Chinese writing gave him a model. Hieroglyphs depend on context, and two of them together can create a new idea. The symbols for eye and water combine to mean crying, though each is neutral alone.

  The best-known intellectual montage comes from his film Strike. Footage of workers being attacked is cut against footage of a bull being slaughtered in an abattoir. The metaphor, that the workers are being treated like cattle, exists in neither shot alone. It appears only when they meet, and it is meant to produce revulsion at the oppression of the proletariat. At the end of Apocalypse Now, the execution of Colonel Kurtz is similarly set against villagers killing a water buffalo in a ritual.

  Eisenstein saw kinship between this method and other art of the early 20th century. Ezra Pound's Ideogrammic Method in Imagism worked by joining concrete images into something new. Cubism tried to combine several perspectives in one painting. He also compared the technique to pre-literate writing, in which pictures placed in sequence create meaning by pressing against each other.

  He believed the method mirrored how everyday thought forms, which made it a potent instrument of propaganda. In October, he built a sequence in which images carrying overtones of political authority and divinity are edited in descending order of impressiveness. The idea of God ends up linked to a block of wood. Eisenstein believed this sequence made the viewer's mind reject political class structures automatically.

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• 5. Eisenstein's Spiral

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  Sergei Eisenstein did not invent montage, but he gave it a codified form that filmmakers and theorists across the world adopted. He began in the Proletkult and became the most outspoken advocate of montage as a revolutionary form. His career is usually divided into two periods.

  The first period produced what are called mass dramas, notably Strike and The Battleship Potemkin. They focused on the capacity of crowds to revolt and aimed to give Marxist political struggle a formal shape. In the second period, his narratives centered on individuals, a shift growing out of a deeper commitment to dialectical materialism. This change reflected the evolution of Marxist thinking itself. His later films Alexander Nevsky of 1938 and Ivan the Terrible of 1944-1946 built their stories around a single figure, which undercut the mass appeal of his early work.

  In his book Nonindifferent Nature, Eisenstein asked how art produces pathos. His definition is vivid. Pathos, he wrote, is "what forces the viewer to jump out of his seat." It is the feeling of being beside oneself, which he called ex stasis, meaning out of a state.

  His explanation rested on a shape from nature, the logarithmic spiral. In this spiral, a smaller part relates to a larger part in the same ratio that the larger part relates to the whole. Eisenstein saw it as the model for organic growth and unity. Scholars have found the same figure in classical architecture, in painting, and in the rule of thirds used in photography today.

  The Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin was his main demonstration. Its tension grows from the way its elements are organized, not from any single piece. Contrary movements collide, with people going up and down the stairs, and the threat narrows from many guns to one muzzle. Viewers who follow that growth arrive at the scene's underlying pathos, which in this case is horror.

  The General Line, also called The Old and the New, offered a quieter test. In the scene with the milk separator, a new 28-inch lens allowed the shot to split and unify at the same time. Milk turning into cream stood in for the peasants' own transformation, and the scene echoed the theme of collective unity from Potemkin.

  Eisenstein concluded that pathos cannot be created by outside features alone, because it belongs to form itself. He pointed to different painters' images of Christ driving out the moneylenders and rising again, which keep a consistent pathos across artists and eras.

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• 6. The Machine Eye

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  Dziga Vertov founded a group called Kino-Eye, whose members called themselves Kinoks, or cinema-eye men. Its official voice was the Council of Three. Their 1922 text, We: Variant of a Manifesto, demanded the death of cinematography "so that the art of cinema may live". They blamed the old guard for clinging to prerevolutionary models and a routine six-act psychodrama that had left film stagnant.

  The Council's resolution of the 10th of April 1923 named newsreel as the cure. The group also insisted that cinema be separated from the other arts, especially the theater, which they accused of cobbling together objects and labors to stay relevant. Film, they argued, should meet life as it happens and draw its synthesis from there.

  Their most radical idea concerned the human body. Kino-Eye criticized American cinema for treating human perception as the standard. As their text put it, "We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera." Vertov wrote in the voice of the camera itself, claiming to build "a new, perfect man" through montage from the best hands, legs, and head of different people.

  In Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov built one sequence around the movement of circularity. Industrial threading machines and human motions that turn in circles share the same rhythm. By his own standard, such a sequence is hardly even a scene.

  In 1925, Vertov published Kinopravda and Radiopravda, aiming to record the sounds of ordinary life as well. The goal was broadcast to a worldwide proletariat, so that workers of every land could see, hear, and understand one another.

  Vertov's attack on fiction was blunt. Among his slogans: "Film-drama is the opium of the people." Another demanded, "Down with the staging of everyday life! Film us as we are." Eisenstein answered that Kino-Eye lacked an ideological method, since Vertov joined images without any clear political link. Vertov replied that Eisenstein's staged revolutions lacked the visceral weight of unscripted action.

  A third voice came from the constructivist Gan. He objected that Kino-Eye misunderstood the worker's role, and he declared that "Constructivism digs art's grave." His film Island of the Young Pioneers followed children living self-sustaining lives in the countryside. It has since been lost or destroyed.

  Gan wrote that he built a cinema-object out of everyday life, and that the story from a script by Verevkin did not weigh life down. The shoot resembled the summer camps many Russian children already enjoyed, and the camera recorded performance as a practice and not as a product. The scholar Kristin Romberg locates the gap between Gan and Vertov in empathy. Gan's role-playing with the children assumed it, while Vertov's constant critique left little room for it.

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• 7. Sound and the State

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  Pudovkin first opposed synchronized sound, and he did so loudly. He feared that it would be easy for capitalism to turn into a commodity and that it would push film toward naturalism. Because synchronized sound was tied to the image, he reasoned, it could only increase continuity, and continuity weakens the collision of ideas. He also noted that music had long accompanied films, so sound's dialectical potential had already been explored.

  He later changed his mind. Like Eisenstein and others, he came to see sound as counterpoint, a way to add conflict to a film. That view clashed with the state's demand for clear, continuous narrative, and the clash produced confusion and stagnation for much of the period.

  Vertov took up the problem from the newsreel side. In essays on Ukrainfilm's first sound film, Symphony of the Donbas, and on First Steps, both from 1931, he took apart the technical, logistical, and political obstacles to synchronized sound. His film Enthusiasm of 1931 was his proof that sound was essential to the newsreel. He described machine noise from the All-Union Stokehold filling the streets and blending with military bands. He asked that this be viewed not as a shortcoming but as "a serious, long-range experiment".

  The larger pressure came from Socialist Realism, the art of the Stalin era. It was mainly a literary movement, exemplified by Maxim Gorky's novel Mother, and filmmakers took cues from writers. The five-year plan told workers to "overfill the plan", which meant filmmakers were expected to exceed baseline standards too.

  Clarity of story became the overriding principle. According to Vance Kepley Jr., this answered a growing belief that early montage films had limited cinema's appeal to highly skilled audiences instead of the general public.

  During the 1930s, the shift to Socialist Realism became Party policy, modeled on Hollywood's popularity with ordinary viewers. The irony is that continuity editing, the very point of divergence for the montage theorists, became the paramount technique of Soviet filmmaking. Kepley's case study is Pudovkin's The Return of Vasilii Bortnikov of 1953. It shows him willingly changing montage to drop its intellectual emphasis, while under strict regulation to meet the Stalinist standard that defined the 1940s and 1950s.

  The combination of regulation and the Hollywood model ultimately led to a shortage of films produced in the Soviet Union in the following decades.

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• 8. After the Revolution

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  In 1928, Eisenstein's theories finally reached Britain through the journal Close Up. Distance, lack of access, and regulations had kept montage theory from spreading widely until well after its explosion in the Soviet Union. Eisenstein himself said that filmmakers in Japan during the 1920s were "quite unaware of montage". Both countries nevertheless made films using something close to continuity editing.

  In the West, the theory was rarely adopted in a pure form. It served instead as a stepping stone for other ideas. Chris Robé, in Left of Hollywood, shows the Western Left toning down revolutionary language and psychoanalyzing characters. Hanns Sachs's essays "Film Psychology" of 1928 and "Kitsch" of 1932 argued that a psychological montage could be found in all films, even abstract ones.

  Zygmunt Tonecky went further in "The Preliminary of Art Film". He disagreed with Eisenstein that montage was logical and called it psychological. Abstract films, in his view, defamiliarize objects and could produce critical spectators, which he saw as a catalyst for revolutionary thinking.

  The sharpest break came with André Bazin's dismissal of montage and the assertion by Cahiers du Cinéma of the primacy of auteurs. Both prized a still, highly composed, individual shot as the mark of artistic significance. That insult to the dialectical method implied that directors could make films alone, at least in terms of credit and authorship. Collective filmmaking, a central aim of the Soviet project, became impossible.

  Their influence did not disappear. Later film theories leaned heavily on montage's turn toward language and a literal grammar of film. A semiotic understanding of film is indebted to Eisenstein, and also stands in contrast with it. Montage appears in the majority of narrative fiction films made today.

  Yet the word itself has been redefined over the last 30 years. Popular usage now means a run of short shots that shows a long stretch of time passing. The training sequence in Rocky of 1976 stands for weeks of preparation in a handful of disparate exercise clips. Ferris Bueller's Day Off of 1986 uses the same device to collapse several hours across Chicago into a few minutes.

  That is the opposite of the Soviet idea, in which time served the collision of images and their symbolic meaning. A Soviet theorist would have judged the Chicago sequence by how its shots collided, not by how many hours it saved.

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