In the 1920s, a filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov took three identical shots of the well-known prerevolutionary actor Moszhukin and intercut them with shots of a plate of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a little girl. According to V. I. Podovkin (a filmmaker, who is Kuleshov’s student), who later described the results of the experiment, audiences exclaimed at Moszhukin’s subtle and affective ability to convey such varied emotions: hunger, sadness and affection. In his two major works, Pudovkin developed from the basic root of the his experiments with Kuleshov a varied theory of cinema centered on what he called “relational editing”. For Pudovkin, montage was “the method which controls the ‘psychological guidance’ of the spectator”. In this respect, his theory was simply Expressionist – that is, mainly concerned with how the filmmaker can affect the observer. But he identified five separate and distinct types of montage: contrast, parallelism, symbolism, simultaneity, and leitmotif. He saw montage as the complex, pumping heart of film, but he also felt that its purpose was to support narrative rather than to alter it.
Eisenstein set up his own theory of montage – as collision rather than linkage – in apposition to Pudovkin’s theory. For Eisenstein, montage has as its aim the creation of ideas, of a new reality, rather than the support of narrative, the old reality of experience. As a student, he had been fascinated by Oriental ideograms that combined elements of widely different meaning in order to create entirely new meanings, and he regarded the ideogram as a model of cinematic montage. Taking an idea from the literary Formalists, he conceived of the elements of a film being “decomposed” or “neutralised” so that they could serve as fresh material for dialectic montage.
Eisenstein extended this concept of dialectics even to the shot itself. As shots related to each other dialectically, so the basic elements of a single shot – which he called its “attractions” – could interrelate to produce new meanings. Attractions as he defined them included “every aggressive moment … every element … that brings to light in the spectator those senses or that psychology that influence his experience – every element that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain emotional shots in a proper order within the totality …” [Film Sense, p. 231].
Because attractions existed within the framework of that totality, a further extension of montage was suggested: a montage of attractions. “Instead of a static ‘reflection’ of event with all possibilities for activity within the limits of the event’s logical action, we advance to a new plane – free montage of arbitrarily selected, independent … attractions …” [p. 232].
Later, Eisenstein developed a more elaborate view of the system of attractions in which one was always dominant while others were subsidiary. The problem here was that the idea of the dominant seemed to conflict with the concept of neutralisation, which supposedly prepared all the elements to be used with equal ease by the filmmaker.
Possibly the most important ramification of Eisenstein’s system of attractions, dominants and dialectic collision montage lies in its implication for the observer of film. Whereas Pudovkin had seen the techniques of montage as an aid to narrative, Eisenstein reconstructed montage in opposition to straight narrative. If shot A and B were to form an entirely new idea C, the the audience had to become directly involved. It was necessary that they work to understand the inherent meaning of the montage. Eisenstein, in suggesting an extreme Formalism in which photographed reality ceased to be itself and became instead simply a stock of raw material – attractions, or “shocks” – for the filmmaker to rearrange as he saw fit.
References:
Monaco, J. (2013), How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 448-56.
Eisenstein, S (1943). The film sense. Ed. Jay Leyda. London: Faber & Faber.
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