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CollectionMovements and eras
Soviet Montage
After 1917 a group of Soviet directors treated the cut as the argument, not the glue. Kuleshov showed that the same face, next to soup or a corpse, seemed to change expression. Eisenstein wanted collision. Pudovkin wanted linkage. Vertov wanted no actors. Dovzhenko mostly ignored the debate and filmed sunflowers.
The films run roughly in release order, so the argument builds as it happened. Aelita comes first as the thing they were reacting against: Constructivist costumes on a conventionally cut melodrama. Then the theory arrives in quick succession, loudest on the Odessa Steps and quietest in By the Law, three people in a Yukon cabin, the same idea without a crowd. The comedies are here too, because Kuleshov's workshop and Barnet used the method for laughs.
By 1929 the state wanted clearer morals and fewer experiments. Earth is the last lyric before that door closed.
Printed in night
The programme
The baseline. Protazanov cuts like the pre-revolutionary professional he was, and all the novelty is in the costumes. The new cinema starts by refusing exactly this.
2. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks
Необычайные приключения мистера Веста в стране большевиков
SilentKuleshov's workshop in a comedy, and the method is American: fast cuts, stunts, a cowboy loose in Moscow. Half the movement is in the cast.
The method announced in public. Cruder than Man with a Movie Camera, and the crudeness is the manifesto.
Eisenstein's first feature, and the collision theory's first test at length. Everything the steps in Potemkin do, he tried here first, with more jokes and less control.
The steps at full volume. The meaning is in the joins, and the ending is the one the rest of the film was built to earn.
Pudovkin's answer to Eisenstein: linkage, not collision. The shots build on each other until the politics arrive as weather.
The same idea with three people. No crowds, and it is the most nervous film in the collection.
The montage generation looking indoors. One room, three people, and a woman the film sides with over both men.
Pudovkin's anniversary picture, the same events as October carried by one man. Watch how often the city's statues get the reaction shot.
The comedy wing of the movement. Barnet cuts at a speed the theorists would have envied and spends it on a landlord joke.
Theory outrunning the audience. Trotsky was cut out after it was made, which is montage of another kind.
A western in Soviet clothes. The fur-trading scene, the price of one pelt, is everything after it at small scale.
Dovzhenko arrives and ignores the debate. The cutting follows a dream's logic, not a thesis. Eisenstein admired it and could not have made it.
The second panel of Dovzhenko's trilogy. A newsreel and a folk song in the same reel, and he refuses to say which is which.
Vertov's whole argument in one film, with the camera as the hero. Where Eisenstein wanted collision, Vertov wanted the machine to see.
The Factory of the Eccentric Actor takes on a massacre. Shostakovich wrote his first film score for it, and it fought the picture in some houses.
Montage from inside one man's head. Where Eisenstein argued, Ermler simulates.
His last silent. The Party changed the line on the countryside during production and the title changed with it. The separator is where form outruns the assignment.
The last lyric before the door closed. Watch the dance on the road.
Montage without actors or a crowd to argue with. John Grierson prepared the English version, and the British documentary movement took notes.
