Nearly a century later, Man with a Movie Camera remains one of the most innovative films when it comes to editing and how it creates meaning. The next shot shows a different couple signing divorce papers at the same place. ![]() For example, in one scene a newly married couple joyfully signs papers at a courthouse. She opens her eyes, then the film cuts to window shutters opening, then to the camera itself as the lens focuses in on flowers. Towards the beginning of the film, a woman awakens and washes her face. The Odessa Steps scene, and the famous moment when a baby in a carriage hurtles down the steps away from the dead mother, has spawned many homages including Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987).ĭirected and edited by husband-and-wife team Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova, Man with a Movie Camera creates a mesmerizing portrait of a Soviet city and its inhabitants without any plot through montage editing. The impact never appears on screen, but the before and after shots, as the woman screams while blood streams down her face behind her broken glasses, edited with shots of other horror, sears in the viewer’s mind. For example, at one point the soldiers shoot a woman in the eye. Intercut shots of people fleeing, shrieking, dying, and mourning collapse time and space in a moment of shared suffering despite very little on-screen violence. This montage shows shots of different deity statues from different cultures, questioning the idea of “God,” in the phrase “For God and country.” However, the “emotional montage” in Battleship Potemkin, in which soldiers massacre unarmed civilians as they protest on the Odessa steps, lives on film history for its affective horror. His October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) beautifully explores what he calls “intellectual montage” (editing designed to make the viewer think, rather than feel). The main proponent of montage theory, Sergei Eisenstein, practiced what he preached in his own films. Though not a true example of montage, Dulac’s work in Madame Beudet shows the evolution of editing in narrative film and how it can be used for artistic, philosophical effect. Within the confines of the home, close up shots of things like clocks and flowers become more than details, but instead deeper signifiers of the heroine’s struggles. ![]() Even this comic inset illustrates an oppressive patriarchy. Her husband asks if she wants to attend an opera and the viewer sees Madame Beudet’s imagination of men in ridiculous costumes surrounding a woman and singing at her. Though aligning more with Impressionism and Surrealism, her films use editing to establish a character’s interiority.Ī great example of Dulac’s “proto-montage” can be found in The Smiling Madame Beudeut, a forty-minute portrait of the eponymous character in an oppressive marriage, as various shots illustrate her thoughts and feelings. This list will explore which films demonstrate the potential of montage and its effect on cinema history.Īn early feminist filmmaker, Germaine Dulac also wrote film theory and once argued that meaning happened both within and between the shots. Many filmmakers have put their own spin on the montage to marvelous effect. ![]() Described by Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, who sought to apply their new country’s philosophy (dialecticism) to this exciting new art form of cinema, montage theory has since found its way to Hollywood and beyond. Montage Theory, the staple of college Cinema Studies classes, holds that the juxtaposition of images via editing can make meaning beyond what can be represented visually.
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