Lessons in Soviet montage: editing techniques

This Sunday (Jan 21); Ninotchka at the Hammer Museum, 7pm, free admission
 Russian 31: Sample Quiz
4) According to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the main task
1) Cinema’s origins lie in
of Soviet cinema was:
a. Magic lanterns
a. Entertainment
b. Peep shows
b. Pro t
c. Vaudeville
c. Propaganda
d. All of the above
d. Art
2) Film was born in or around 1895 in a
5) Battleship Potemkin was perceived as:
a. Paris basement café
a. Revolutionary in form
b. London underground
b. Revolutionary in content
c. New York sky scraper
c. Calling for revolution
d. Egyptian tomb
d. All of the above
3) For Maxim Gorky, the “kingdom of shadows”
6) “Workers of the World, Unite! You have nothing
described:
to lose, but your …”
a. Russia at the turn of the 20C
a. Keys
b. Early cinema
b. Pants
c. American politics
c. Chains
d. German philosophy
d. Dignity
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Lessons in Soviet montage: editing techniques
The Fathers of Soviet Montage
Soviet montage cinema

1918: Civil War (Reds against Whites)

Shortage of lm stock

destroyed movie theaters

new, young leftist artists join cinema

“agit-prop” :

Theater (Eisenstein)

Agit-train (Vertov, Medvedkin)

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 Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)

First theory, then practice

“Films without lms"

Revolutionary cinema demands a

new style

Quick, rhythmic cutting (known as

“American montage”)

Different kind of acting (not

bourgeois melodrama)
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 Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of lmmaking. The
lm editor works with the raw footage, selecting shots and combining them into
sequences to create a nished motion picture.

Film editing is described as an art or skill, the only art that is unique to cinema,
separating lmmaking from other art forms that preceded it, although there are
close parallels to the editing process in other art forms like poetry or novel
writing. Film editing is often referred to as the “invisible art” because when it is
well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that he or she is not even
aware of the editor’s work.

On its most fundamental level, lm editing is the art, technique, and practice of
assembling shots into a coherent sequence. The job of an editor isn’t simply to
mechanically put pieces of a lm together, cut o lm slates, or edit dialogue
scenes. A lm editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story,
dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors’ performances to effectively “re-
imagine” and even rewrite the lm to craft a cohesive whole.
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 Early lms were short lms that were one long, static, and locked-down shot.
Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, so the rst
lms simply showed activity such as tra c moving on a city street. There was no
story and no editing. Each lm ran as long as there was lm in the camera.

Continuity editing: what became known as the popular ‘classical Hollywood’

style of editing was developed by early European and American directors, in
particular D.W. Gri th in his lms such as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance.

The classical style ensures temporal and spatial continuity as a way of

advancing narrative, using such techniques as the “180 degree rule,”
“Establishing shot,” and “Shot / reverse shot.”
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 Montage: in motion picture terminology, a “montage” (from the French for
“putting together” or “assembly”) is a lm editing technique. There are at least
three senses of the term:

1. In French lm practice, “montage” has its literal French meaning (assembly,

installation) and simply identi es editing.

2. In Soviet lmmaking of the 1920s, “montage” was a method of juxtaposing

shots to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot alone.

3. In classical Hollywood cinema, a “montage sequence” is a short segment in a

lm in which narrative information is presented in a condensed fashion.

The term was introduced to cinema primarily by Sergei Eisenstein, and early
Soviet directors used it as a synonym for creative editing. In France the word
“montage” simply denotes cutting. The term “montage sequence” has been used
primarily by British and American studios, which refers to the common
technique of using montage to suggest the passage of time, rather than to
create symbolic meaning as it does in Soviet montage theory.
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“Kuleshov effect”
Battleship Potemkin (1925)

A new “plotless” cinema:

not about individual fate or
psychology, but about
historical change, mass
movement

Using only cinematic means of

expression: very few intertitles,
the story is told visually,
through montage / editing

Characters are not individuals,

but types (use of non-
professional actors)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Montage: editing in a way that

produces new meaning through
juxtaposition of images (shots) for
emotional and political effect

Editing as con ict, collision (not

“invisible” or “continuity” editing)

Dialectical thinking: thesis, antithesis,

synthesis

“Intellectual montage”: two images

are juxtaposed to produce not a
third image, but a new meaning

Not a “Cine-Eye” but a “Cine-Fist”

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Example of intellectual montage (Battleship Potemkin, 1925)
Odesa Steps sequence (Battleship Potemkin, 1925)
The Stairway Shootout - The Untouchables (1987, dir. Brian de Palma)
Odesa Steps (Battleship Potemkin, 1925)
Shot breakdown, Odesa Steps sequence (Battleship Potemkin, 1925)
Shot breakdown, shower sequence (Psycho, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Man with the Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
 Man with a Movie Camera

A day in the life of a city

A day in the life of a cameraman
Time/ duration vs movement / stillness
“Non-played” lm: “propaganda by
means of facts”
Montage (the importance of editing
and the fragment)
Cinema as work
Cinema as magic (trick)
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 Manufacturing Truth
Not one city
Not one day
Not one cameraman
“a lm about lmmaking and about
lm, an experiment in lm language
which springs from the context of the
Russian avant-garde” (RCR 174)
kaleidoscopic variety of perspectives
Demysti cation: lm is never an
unmediated re ection of reality
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 Filmed over a period of about 3 years
In at least four cities – Moscow, Kyiv,
Kharkiv and Odesa (also Leningrad)
by at least two cameramen
But edited to look like a single uni ed
whole
Montage, manipulation, tricks,
animation, superimposition,
stopped, reversed, frozen time
Structure: city coming awake (slow);
cameraman goes to work (beginning
to speed up); work (fast speed);
leisure and play (slows down); life
events /urban montage (super fast)
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 Cover of Soviet Cinema
(1927)

(Kaufman on roller skates)

Invisible editing vs invisible editors
 Women at work in an
editing room in Italy in
the early 1960s,
pictured in Roberto
Bencivenga’s “The
Production Assistants”
in the publication Così

(Girish Shambu,
“Hidden Histories: The
Story of Women Film
Editors”)
Mothers of Soviet Montage: Elizaveta Svilova (1900-1975)
 Elizaveta Svilova
1900 – 1975

b. Moscow into a railway worker’s

family in 1900

apprenticed in the lm industry as

early as 1912, cleaning lm and
aiding the selection of positives and
negatives in a lm laboratory

1914, worked for Pathé studio as a

cutter and photo-printer

1918, Svilova moved to Narkompros,

to “nationalize the lm industry,”

1922, she was managing the editing

workshop at Goskino (State Cinema),
where she meets Dziga Vertov
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Svilova and Vertov
Vertov and Svilova at work
Elizaveta Svilova and Dziga Vertov editing Enthusiasm (1930)
ELIZAVETA SVILOVA AT THE EDITING TABLE (KINO-PRAVDA 19)
“Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19” (Kino-Pravda 19, Vertov, 1924)
Svilova at work (Man with the Movie Camera, 1929)
Man with the Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929)
Svilova’s eye in the nal shot of Man with the Movie Camera (dir. Vertov, 1929)
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 Es r Shub
1894 – 1959

well-to-do Jewish family in Ukraine,grew

up surrounded by artists, poets, theater
actors, and directors

1922 lm editor for Goskino (State

Cinema), in charge of reediting foreign
lms imported for Soviet distribution (over
200 lms)

with Eisenstein, reedited Fritz Lang’s Dr.

Mabuse (1922), in which they “changed
the narrative structure of the lm as well as
the intertitles”

Montage lms:
1927 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty
1927 The Great Way
1928 Russia of Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoy
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 “A person who cannot edit should not make lms at all.
Just like a cameraperson who cannot shoot should not
make lms as a director.” (Es r Shub)
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 Shub at atbed with celluloid-strip
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“A constructivist evening” with Es r Shub (bottom right), Rodchenko’s poster for Vertov’s Kino-Eye (above)
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 Es r Shub cameo in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
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Sergei Eisenstein on the throne of Nicholas II (for shooting October (1927)
Eisenstein and Shub on the throne of Nicholas II
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Shub, 1929)
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Shub, 1929)
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Shub, 1929)
 1929

The Great Turning Point

 1929: The Great Turning Point
“Socialism in one country” (Trotsky exiled)

Great Depression

First Five Year Plan (1928-1932)

Industrialization, Collectivization, Centralization

Every major Sov lmmaker goes abroad

Coming of sound (1927-1928)

Coming of Socialist Realism (1934)

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