Historical Background of Soviet Montage

The year 1905 brought about turmoil and communal unrest in Russia. Whereby many of Russia’s citizens were angry with their government, particularly with Tsar Nicholas II, who was the Russian monarch at the said time. Many citizens wanted the right to hold democratic elections, freedom to form unions, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. Moreover, many lower class workers in factories began to go on strike and refused to pay taxes in order to demand these political changes. This carried on till 1917, where a series of revolutions flared up again. But this time, the revolutionaries succeeded in getting Nicholas II to give up his control of the government. This resulted in the Russian government ruled by a democratic government for about eight months before the Bolshevik party overtook control of the government. The Bolsheviks believed in the Marxist ideals of Communism and it was under their rule that the USSR was formed and Russia became a Communist state. It was in this revolutionary circumstance that the concept of Soviet montage was born.

This new Communist government encouraged the development of the national film industry. But many of the early Soviet filmmakers were too poor to afford cameras and film stock to shoot new films. As an alternative, they began to experiment with editing old films. They took old footage from pre-revolutionary Russian melodramas and a few rare Hollywood films and re-cut them and merged them together in unconventional ways.Under the guidance of filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, a group of film students studied a unique film and its editing techniques in detail. The said film is Intolerance (1916) by D. W. Griffiths. After a while, they started to experiment with re-editing the film and discovered that they could radically change the meaning and feeling of the film just by editing it differently. In an experiment, Kuleshovmerged together a series of shots which had been filmed entirely out of sequence and in different times and places, which are - a waiting man, a walking woman, a gate, a staircase, and a mansion. The audience read spatial and temporal sense into the sequence, deciding that they saw the man and the woman meeting in front of the gate at the same time.This experiment led many Soviet filmmakers to realize that the meaning of a film is not innate in the images themselves, but rather in the juxtaposition of those images side by side. This led to the development of montage theory, or the theory that images could be combined together in ways that could create new meanings that weren’t innate to the images themselves.

In the 1920s when the Soviet government was finally able to purchase some film equipment and film stock, VsevelodPudovkin(one of the influential montage theorists and filmmakers in Russia at this time and also one of Kuleshov’s apprentices), Pudovkin began to create some very interesting and confrontational films using his theories about montage. Pudovkin believed that film actors don’t really act. Rather, it’s the context the actors are in that creates emotional and intellectual meaning. And this context is established through montage by showing the relationship of the actor to exterior objects. For example, his film Mother (1926) is about factory workers who try to form a union to protest unfair working conditions in the time period just before the first Russian revolution. The factory owners and policemen who oppress the workers wear sinister looking leather gloves. Pudovkin cuts between images of these oppressive men and close ups of their tightly clenched fists, evoking a symbolic equivalent, suggesting violence and aggressiveness.In other words, Pudovkin often cut between two images to suggest a symbolic link or connection between them. By seeing these two images side by side, the filmmaker encourages you to figure out that there is a psychological relationship between the two shots. Whereby the two shots combined together to create a new idea.

Another individual that shared Pudovkin’s commitment to the revolution and to the Communist ideals of the new Russian government is Sergei Eisenstein. Both of their films had themes exploring social conflicts and the oppression of the Russian lower class. Pudovkin’s use of montage was intended to enhance the dramatic narrative, whereas Eisenstein wanted to interrupt the narrative with clashing ideas, wherethe transitions between shots should not be smooth. Rather, they should be sharp, jolting, and even violent because conflict is universal. In addition,  Eisenstein felt that films could include images that were thematically or metaphorically relevant, regardless of whether they could be found in the location of the film or not. For example, in Eisenstein’s first film Strike (1925), he spliced together images of workmen being shot down by machine guns with images of oxen being slaughtered. The oxen were not literally on the location where the story takes place. The image was merged in for metaphorical purposes, similar to how literature might make a figurative comparison.

The use of montages has become common in mainstreamfilms todaywhich tend to gravitate more to Pudovkin’s style, using montage to enhance the emotional drama of the story and to suggest a psychological relationship between the images in the montage. Stereotypically, Hollywood montages are used in order to communicate a great deal of information in ashort amounttime.