
Film Montage
Lenin was one of the first world leaders to grasp the enormous potential of the new art form of cinema as a tool of education and propaganda. Soviet film pioneers were instructed by him to study in particular the revolutionary film techniques of of the American director D.W.Griffiths in films such as Intolerance and The Birth Of A Nation.
Griffiths use of close ups, moving cameras and changing camera angles, his cross-cutting and editing techniques all generated a powerful emotional effect on an audience; something that the Soviets were keen to reproduce. From closely examining Griffiths achievements, the Russians sought to develop general principles of film-making which they could apply to their own projects. It is from this that the theory of Film Montage evolved.
In an early experiment, a close up of a well known actor was juxtaposed in turn with shots of a plate of soup on the table, a coffin containing a dead woman, and a little girl playing with a toy bear. When shown to an audience who were not in the know, they praised the quality of the acting: the hunger over the soup, sadness about the dead woman and pleasure at watching the child.
This experiment purported to prove that it was the editing of the shots that created meaning in the mind of the spectator rather than the actual content of the shots themselves. This artful arrangement of imagery was given the name ‘Montage‘ to distinguish it from the mere process of editing images together for continuity.
The Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein is most closely associated with developing this ‘new’ style of cinema; one that was to become incredibly influential. Sequences from his films, most notably the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence from his film Battleship Potemkin are world famous and have often been imitated and parodied.
Hitchcock talks about his technique
Hitchcock was one of many directors influenced by Russian and German cinema. He started making films in the silent movie era and then made a successful transition to ‘talkies’; something that not all of his contemporaries succeeded in doing; but his trademark type of suspense thriller depended heavily on montage techniques of editing.
Mise en scène – a complimentary opposite to montage technique, mise en scène uses the whole frame of the film to create a narrative.