Soviet Russian Film : Eisenstein
How is the audience positioned to respond to the films of Eisenstein? How does he achieve these reactions in both Battleship Potemkin and Strike?
Sergei Eisenstein was a Russian propagandist during the Bolshevik Revolution in the 1920’s and recognised and then created film to be used as a propaganda tool to represent communist social messages. Soviet montage film was an advanced style of cinema that used advanced, unique editing and clever use of camera angles and distances that encouraged an active and intellectual audience response.
Battleship Potemkin is a reproduction of the revolution in 1905 and in reality the ship sank but the film shows a victory for the Communists and the length that the government would go to distort reality in order to promote its view. For example, the fourth act ‘Odessa Steps’ in the film is a famous montage scene of soviet people being attacked by the Cossack soldiers. The disrupted temporal continuity ensures an intellectual response and by using overlapping editing there is various different stories shown simultaneously as Eisenstein expands and compresses time to increase the drama of the scene. By using montage, Eisenstein manipulates the audience response, as they have to draw on their visual cognition to put the colliding images together. This also keeps the focus on the intellectual aspect rather than overwhelming the audience with emotion, by doing this he maintains focus on the stories that are being shown. Eisenstein captured the raw emotion of the event in his reproduction and as an audience we are positioned to feel the horror of the event but kept distant enough to not be side tracked by becoming emotionally attached to characters in the scene.
A key aspect of soviet montage film was the unique style of editing. The composition of elements in the scene wasn’t accidental. The shot of the statue shows authority against the establishment and Eisenstein used linear planes to show the severity of the scenario. The conflict
Sergei Eisenstein was a Russian propagandist during the Bolshevik Revolution in the 1920’s and recognised and then created film to be used as a propaganda tool to represent communist social messages. Soviet montage film was an advanced style of cinema that used advanced, unique editing and clever use of camera angles and distances that encouraged an active and intellectual audience response.
Battleship Potemkin is a reproduction of the revolution in 1905 and in reality the ship sank but the film shows a victory for the Communists and the length that the government would go to distort reality in order to promote its view. For example, the fourth act ‘Odessa Steps’ in the film is a famous montage scene of soviet people being attacked by the Cossack soldiers. The disrupted temporal continuity ensures an intellectual response and by using overlapping editing there is various different stories shown simultaneously as Eisenstein expands and compresses time to increase the drama of the scene. By using montage, Eisenstein manipulates the audience response, as they have to draw on their visual cognition to put the colliding images together. This also keeps the focus on the intellectual aspect rather than overwhelming the audience with emotion, by doing this he maintains focus on the stories that are being shown. Eisenstein captured the raw emotion of the event in his reproduction and as an audience we are positioned to feel the horror of the event but kept distant enough to not be side tracked by becoming emotionally attached to characters in the scene.
A key aspect of soviet montage film was the unique style of editing. The composition of elements in the scene wasn’t accidental. The shot of the statue shows authority against the establishment and Eisenstein used linear planes to show the severity of the scenario. The conflict