Comparing Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was made up of a series of revolutions in Russian with the aim to disassemble the authoritative Tsarist autocracy that eventually led to the upsurge of the Soviet Union. During this time, a new wave of innovative filmmakers who were determined to create a new way of seeing came about. Before the revolution, Russian films were dark, slow-moving melodramas featuring popular stars, but by 1917 the Russian film industry was galvanized by young men and women who despised the oppressive customs put in place by the Tsarist regime and they thus made tentative moves that resulted in the growth of a national cinema movement which would reflect new social ideals. These young people wanted to establish a new type of cinema
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that would be revolutionary in not only its subject matter but also its style. They also wanted to equip filmmakers with brand-new tools that would allow for a new way of story telling. It was around this time when renowned soviet filmmakers such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov were making films that differed greatly from the Tsarist cinema. Films became fast paced, embellished with stunts, fights, chases, and they were edited with the freedom of an American movie. It was Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) which really defined the new cinema movement. Eisenstein focused on the idea that a film’s power comes from the juxtaposition of shots, not the delicate performances of experienced actors. The Soviets realized that through editing, two shots could provoke an emotion or idea that was not originally present in either of them. Eisenstein described it perfectly: “Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quite different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming” (Giannetti 163). The invention of Soviet montage editing allowed for filmmakers to develop a new power in which they could psychologically manipulate audiences. Earlier studies of montage cinema have solely focused on its visual and technical properties; however, Soviet montage cinema went even further than just its technical and aesthetic aspects in that it was fundamentally a rhetoric of cinema. Soviet filmmakers such as Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein all used the Soviet montage technique, and, although their methods differed, they essentially used this kind of cinema as propaganda with their goals being to break away from the Soviet pressures to submit to social realism, inspire people to revolt against the oppressive rule of Stalinism, and accurately reveal reality to audiences instead of hiding or altering it.
Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein all agreed that using cinema as propaganda was the greatest weapon of all. Lev Kuleshov, the originator of Soviet montage cinema, stated that the montage technique was directly connected to the political position of the filmmaker, and that the way in which a filmmaker would chose to juxtapose certain images, even if the images were seemingly neutral at first, undoubtedly communicated that filmmaker’s ideological stance. Kuleshov believed that the main problem with classical Hollywood cinema was that it would cover up reality by constructing it in bourgeois and “fake” ways, and he thus praised the Soviet way of editing. “…The information about these very same events (political events) would be edited so as to illuminate the entire condition of things in the capitalist world, to reveal its essential exploitativeness, and the position of the workers as it is in reality” (Kuleshov On Film 185). According to Kuleshov, montage is used as a way to reveal reality and openly present a certain ideological stance without covering up anything, which would thus reveal the reality of a particular situation, in this case it being political.
Cinema is one of the best mediums to be turned into propaganda and to be used as persuasive rhetoric because it concurrently brings together masses of people while also psychologically manipulating them by showing them a series of meticulously juxtaposed images on a screen. Once the 1917 revolution began, it was difficult to get access to film stock. As a result, filmmakers learned the art of filmmaking through experimentation with found footage, specifically by observing what would happen when combining this found footage together in various ways. The revolution resulted in an increased demand for political propaganda, and certain revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin (founder of the Russian Communist Party and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution) insisted that the best way to communicate revolutionary ideas was through film. In 1922 Lenin stated, “Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important” (Film Art 477). Lenin saw film as the ideal tool for education and thus encouraged the documentary as well as propaganda style of filmmaking. Eisenstein and Vertov detested the “bourgeois” continuity style of filmmaking and deemed it a false reality. Instead, they supported the Marxist system that focused on the conflict of political ideologies. Eisenstein was adamant about using cinema as a way to arouse emotions and urge civilians to support the revolution. Eisenstein used the technique of intellectual montage where he would combine images and then contrast them (Barrance 2015). This can be seen in his 1925 film Strike where he juxtaposes shots of someone slaughtering a cow with shots of military troops killing innocent workers, implying that innocent people are being executed in the same way as animals. In his 1928 film October, Christian emblems are cut together with shots of religious symbols from different cultures, which suggests that all religions are ultimately one and the same. The most famous montage filled Eisenstein film is his 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, specifically the scene at the Odessa steps where military personnel are seen massacring protesting Russian civilians. This scene uses various montage methods such as graphic visuals, jarring cuts from extreme long shots to extreme close-ups, dramatic camera movements, abstract compositions using a mixture of horizontal and diagonal placement of people and objects, and then there is also the use of stretched/elongated time, specifically the seven long minute take of a woman rushing down the Odessa steps. Eisenstein’s purpose for using this type of montage was to show audiences just how cruel the Russian government was. Through Russian montage he was able to show life as it really was, and he hoped that, as a result, people would start to become angered by what they saw and finally stand up to their oppressive government.
Similar to Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov approached his filmmaking with revolutionary vigor and condemned the way the older Russian films were made.
“WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous. Keep away from them. Keep your eyes off them. They’re mortally dangerous- contagious!” (Kino-Eye 7). Vertov was similar to Eisenstein in the sense that he also put the montage technique to a smart an effective use. Vertov too wanted to portray the “truth”, which he believed could only be done through a camera’s objective lens. Most people remember Vertov for his fascination with the documentary film. His 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera is the perfect example of one of his documentary films that utilizes the montage technique. In this film, Vertov uses Soviet montage to make the camerawork obvious. He disliked the continuity system, which tried to hide the filmmaking, and thus did whatever he could to go against it. This film provided a filmic exaltation of life in Soviet Russia. Vertov wanted to portray communist principles by showing clips of life in a Soviet civilization, and he also utilized the technique of Soviet montage to create meaning from imagery that would usually be considered
meaningless.
The Man with a Movie Camera is filled with montage sequences that Vertov uses to juxtapose various documentary clips which, as a result, generate socialist context. This is very similar to the way Eisenstein used the montage technique in his film October. For example, at the beginning of this movie there are clips of industrial machines shown in a montage juxtaposed with people walking in the streets right after they have woken up. The use of montage here is Vertov’s way of connecting machines to a literal awakening of society. Vertov then proceeds to include these industrial machines in the rest of the film, which is his way of portraying the significance of machinery in the Soviet community and its unfortunate interference with civilization. Directly following this beginning scene is a clip of a woman who has just awoken and is blinking quickly. She is first introduced in montage form: she blinks, then we see window blinds opening and closing, then we see the rapid opening and closing of a camera lens. Through this, there is a direct correlation between this woman, waking up, and the camera. This is Vertov’s way of communicating his idea that socialism is what is going to wake society up from a prolonged state of sleep, and this relates to his main ideology, which is that socialism is going to represent a new, fresh era in Soviet history (Editing the Past 42).
By the end of the 1920s, Eisenstein, Vertov, and other famous Soviet directors had finished working on around four important movies, but then, suddenly, the movement started to decline once the Communist government decided to censor the Montage style of filmmaking. Stalin ordered that filmmakers create films that would be easily understandable for all viewers, and thus stylistic, experimental, and nonrealistic films were censured (Film Art 479). Around 1934, the government instituted a new style of filmmaking called Socialist Realism which dictated that cinema must portray revolutionary progress while also being entirely grounded in realism. So thus the era of the rebellious Soviet montage died somewhere in the early 1930s, right around the time that Vertov released his 1931 film Enthusiasm, however, filmmakers still went on to use the masterful technique of Montage. In fact, we most definitely still see the technique used in contemporary Hollywood cinema.
Just as Kuleshov and his fellow film peers enjoyed emulating American movies, Hollywood imitated Soviet techniques by also using “montage sequences,” something that became popular in 1930s Hollywood and is still used today. We see many of the same techniques that were used in The Battleship Potemkin in movies such as Bananas, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and The Untouchables. In Geoffrey Reggio’s 1980s film Koyaanisqatsi or Life Out of Balance, audiences can also notice the use of the intellectual montage. There is one scene where he shows images of working men and women on an escalator juxtaposed with machines squeezing out sausages, thus commenting on how insignificant and repetitive these people’s lives are. Soviet montage techniques can even be seen in Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly which uses a ton of jarring cuts from long shots to extreme close-ups, rapid editing, and graphic imagery.
Even more prominent were the influences on the American avant-garde cinema. Filmmakers who used found-footage to create movies such as A Movie owe most of what they know to Vertov’s Kino-Eye, and Eisenstein’s belief that “discontinuity in editing was one creative option that underwrote many modern experiments” (Film Art 479). Moreover, these renown montage directors, with their passion for rebelling against authority and breaking away from the past, have inspired young filmmakers to this day to take a leap of faith and make bold creative decisions.
that would be revolutionary in not only its subject matter but also its style. They also wanted to equip filmmakers with brand-new tools that would allow for a new way of story telling. It was around this time when renowned soviet filmmakers such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov were making films that differed greatly from the Tsarist cinema. Films became fast paced, embellished with stunts, fights, chases, and they were edited with the freedom of an American movie. It was Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) which really defined the new cinema movement. Eisenstein focused on the idea that a film’s power comes from the juxtaposition of shots, not the delicate performances of experienced actors. The Soviets realized that through editing, two shots could provoke an emotion or idea that was not originally present in either of them. Eisenstein described it perfectly: “Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quite different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming” (Giannetti 163). The invention of Soviet montage editing allowed for filmmakers to develop a new power in which they could psychologically manipulate audiences. Earlier studies of montage cinema have solely focused on its visual and technical properties; however, Soviet montage cinema went even further than just its technical and aesthetic aspects in that it was fundamentally a rhetoric of cinema. Soviet filmmakers such as Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein all used the Soviet montage technique, and, although their methods differed, they essentially used this kind of cinema as propaganda with their goals being to break away from the Soviet pressures to submit to social realism, inspire people to revolt against the oppressive rule of Stalinism, and accurately reveal reality to audiences instead of hiding or altering it.
Kuleshov, Vertov, and Eisenstein all agreed that using cinema as propaganda was the greatest weapon of all. Lev Kuleshov, the originator of Soviet montage cinema, stated that the montage technique was directly connected to the political position of the filmmaker, and that the way in which a filmmaker would chose to juxtapose certain images, even if the images were seemingly neutral at first, undoubtedly communicated that filmmaker’s ideological stance. Kuleshov believed that the main problem with classical Hollywood cinema was that it would cover up reality by constructing it in bourgeois and “fake” ways, and he thus praised the Soviet way of editing. “…The information about these very same events (political events) would be edited so as to illuminate the entire condition of things in the capitalist world, to reveal its essential exploitativeness, and the position of the workers as it is in reality” (Kuleshov On Film 185). According to Kuleshov, montage is used as a way to reveal reality and openly present a certain ideological stance without covering up anything, which would thus reveal the reality of a particular situation, in this case it being political.
Cinema is one of the best mediums to be turned into propaganda and to be used as persuasive rhetoric because it concurrently brings together masses of people while also psychologically manipulating them by showing them a series of meticulously juxtaposed images on a screen. Once the 1917 revolution began, it was difficult to get access to film stock. As a result, filmmakers learned the art of filmmaking through experimentation with found footage, specifically by observing what would happen when combining this found footage together in various ways. The revolution resulted in an increased demand for political propaganda, and certain revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin (founder of the Russian Communist Party and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution) insisted that the best way to communicate revolutionary ideas was through film. In 1922 Lenin stated, “Of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important” (Film Art 477). Lenin saw film as the ideal tool for education and thus encouraged the documentary as well as propaganda style of filmmaking. Eisenstein and Vertov detested the “bourgeois” continuity style of filmmaking and deemed it a false reality. Instead, they supported the Marxist system that focused on the conflict of political ideologies. Eisenstein was adamant about using cinema as a way to arouse emotions and urge civilians to support the revolution. Eisenstein used the technique of intellectual montage where he would combine images and then contrast them (Barrance 2015). This can be seen in his 1925 film Strike where he juxtaposes shots of someone slaughtering a cow with shots of military troops killing innocent workers, implying that innocent people are being executed in the same way as animals. In his 1928 film October, Christian emblems are cut together with shots of religious symbols from different cultures, which suggests that all religions are ultimately one and the same. The most famous montage filled Eisenstein film is his 1925 masterpiece Battleship Potemkin, specifically the scene at the Odessa steps where military personnel are seen massacring protesting Russian civilians. This scene uses various montage methods such as graphic visuals, jarring cuts from extreme long shots to extreme close-ups, dramatic camera movements, abstract compositions using a mixture of horizontal and diagonal placement of people and objects, and then there is also the use of stretched/elongated time, specifically the seven long minute take of a woman rushing down the Odessa steps. Eisenstein’s purpose for using this type of montage was to show audiences just how cruel the Russian government was. Through Russian montage he was able to show life as it really was, and he hoped that, as a result, people would start to become angered by what they saw and finally stand up to their oppressive government.
Similar to Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov approached his filmmaking with revolutionary vigor and condemned the way the older Russian films were made.
“WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous. Keep away from them. Keep your eyes off them. They’re mortally dangerous- contagious!” (Kino-Eye 7). Vertov was similar to Eisenstein in the sense that he also put the montage technique to a smart an effective use. Vertov too wanted to portray the “truth”, which he believed could only be done through a camera’s objective lens. Most people remember Vertov for his fascination with the documentary film. His 1929 film The Man with a Movie Camera is the perfect example of one of his documentary films that utilizes the montage technique. In this film, Vertov uses Soviet montage to make the camerawork obvious. He disliked the continuity system, which tried to hide the filmmaking, and thus did whatever he could to go against it. This film provided a filmic exaltation of life in Soviet Russia. Vertov wanted to portray communist principles by showing clips of life in a Soviet civilization, and he also utilized the technique of Soviet montage to create meaning from imagery that would usually be considered
meaningless.
The Man with a Movie Camera is filled with montage sequences that Vertov uses to juxtapose various documentary clips which, as a result, generate socialist context. This is very similar to the way Eisenstein used the montage technique in his film October. For example, at the beginning of this movie there are clips of industrial machines shown in a montage juxtaposed with people walking in the streets right after they have woken up. The use of montage here is Vertov’s way of connecting machines to a literal awakening of society. Vertov then proceeds to include these industrial machines in the rest of the film, which is his way of portraying the significance of machinery in the Soviet community and its unfortunate interference with civilization. Directly following this beginning scene is a clip of a woman who has just awoken and is blinking quickly. She is first introduced in montage form: she blinks, then we see window blinds opening and closing, then we see the rapid opening and closing of a camera lens. Through this, there is a direct correlation between this woman, waking up, and the camera. This is Vertov’s way of communicating his idea that socialism is what is going to wake society up from a prolonged state of sleep, and this relates to his main ideology, which is that socialism is going to represent a new, fresh era in Soviet history (Editing the Past 42).
By the end of the 1920s, Eisenstein, Vertov, and other famous Soviet directors had finished working on around four important movies, but then, suddenly, the movement started to decline once the Communist government decided to censor the Montage style of filmmaking. Stalin ordered that filmmakers create films that would be easily understandable for all viewers, and thus stylistic, experimental, and nonrealistic films were censured (Film Art 479). Around 1934, the government instituted a new style of filmmaking called Socialist Realism which dictated that cinema must portray revolutionary progress while also being entirely grounded in realism. So thus the era of the rebellious Soviet montage died somewhere in the early 1930s, right around the time that Vertov released his 1931 film Enthusiasm, however, filmmakers still went on to use the masterful technique of Montage. In fact, we most definitely still see the technique used in contemporary Hollywood cinema.
Just as Kuleshov and his fellow film peers enjoyed emulating American movies, Hollywood imitated Soviet techniques by also using “montage sequences,” something that became popular in 1930s Hollywood and is still used today. We see many of the same techniques that were used in The Battleship Potemkin in movies such as Bananas, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and The Untouchables. In Geoffrey Reggio’s 1980s film Koyaanisqatsi or Life Out of Balance, audiences can also notice the use of the intellectual montage. There is one scene where he shows images of working men and women on an escalator juxtaposed with machines squeezing out sausages, thus commenting on how insignificant and repetitive these people’s lives are. Soviet montage techniques can even be seen in Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly which uses a ton of jarring cuts from long shots to extreme close-ups, rapid editing, and graphic imagery.
Even more prominent were the influences on the American avant-garde cinema. Filmmakers who used found-footage to create movies such as A Movie owe most of what they know to Vertov’s Kino-Eye, and Eisenstein’s belief that “discontinuity in editing was one creative option that underwrote many modern experiments” (Film Art 479). Moreover, these renown montage directors, with their passion for rebelling against authority and breaking away from the past, have inspired young filmmakers to this day to take a leap of faith and make bold creative decisions.