Sergei Eisenstein

Russian formalism and Pierrot le fou In this essay I will apply the ideas of Sergei Eisenstein to Jean-Luc Godard's film, Pierrot le fou: one of the first road movies. Both are two filmmakers who seek to create transcendental movies through a methodical use of editing and offering a political and controversial vision of the time in history to which they belonged. One is linked to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the other one is a contemporary of May 68, two of the most important events in human history. We can find strong similarities between their works and this essay will show how related they were in the field of montage and the use of sound. Eisenstein thought that montage had a great potential: it served as a base during the process of creating messages. He understood cinema as a discourse in which all parts and their meanings are important: he promulgates the value of all. Exactly what made communism. Hence, his films have been often considered a pamphlet of the regime. He proposed both in theory and in practice the idea that the juxtaposition of shots and frames goes beyond the simple sum of images. This may seem complex, but he meant that the images are not isolated, they…

Soviet Montage was a bold new theory of editing invented by Sergei Eisenstein. This new theory of montage allowed Eisenstein to make the audience think whatever he wanted them to think by arranging striking juxtapositions of individuals shots to suggest an idea that goes further than using a single shot to portray a message. It is an idea that ‘derives from the collision between two [or more] shots that are independent of one another’. (Taylor, Powell, pg 163) These montage sequences create…

need to assemble the film. This unquestionably makes editing the foundation of film art. The importance of editing and appreciating the innovations of edit masters, is the very reason why Vsevolod Pudovkin stated that “the foundation of film art is editing” [Pudovkin, V.I. (1975)]. This is the hypothesis for this dissertation. Before Georges Méliès accidently discovered editing, after a fault with his camera, the art of film was little more than a stage production captured on film. Méliès was…

who would forever revolutionize film editing, a man named Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein recognized five unique styles of editing, and named them the Metric Montage, Rhythmic Montage, Tonal Montage, Overtonal Montage, and Intellectual Montage. To this day, he has inspired many filmmakers with his montage theories, especially those of the early music video industry. One music video in particular, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes (Video Destructo Mix)", competently displays the Metric,…

Potemkin is a 1925 silent film that was directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm.” The film is composed of five different acts, each portraying different concepts and meanings. Act IV: “Odessa Steps Sequence” is one of the most admired scenes of the film. “It has been described as one of the most influential scenes in the history of cinema because the concepts of film editing and montage were introduced to cinema.” Sergei Eisenstein believed that creating ideas together would…

Audience responses to the three sequences suggested a hungry person, a sad husband, and a joyful adult, yet the first shot was always the same” ( Ken Dancyger, The technique of film and video editing, the silent period, chapter 1). This is what I mentioned earlier about the audience being able to draw conclusions about the story. SERGEI EISENSTEIN was another soviet filmmaker and lived the same time that Pudovkin lived. Eisenstein was the first to theorize film editing as a clash of images and…

Battleship Potemkin 'Odessa Steps Sequence' Analysis: Chaos vs Order 1925’s Battleship Potemkin is most famous today for its revolutionary use of montage, effectively used to align order and organization with evil and disorder and chaos with good. This alignment is evident throughout the film, but it is most conspicuous in the famed Odessa Steps Sequence. All 2 minutes of footage is packed with symbolism and visual metaphor, revealing the incessant brutality of the Cossacks against Odessa’s…

Introduction Movies are entertainment and they tell stories about characters going through experiences. But what exactly is the content of the film? To find richer meaning in film, a variety of theories are developed to analyze films in order to understand how they created responses in viewers and just what they might mean. Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) is presented by its non-linear narrative structure. It provides the viewer with the ‘clues’ necessary to decode the film and help them to…

German Expressionism’s goal was to express feelings in the most extreme and straightforward fashion and used distortion to show an emotion rather then a facial appearance. Soviet Dialecticism used film “montage” to show collisions of different elements. The Dialecticism goal was to convey characteristics and sensations in the most direct fashion. German Expressionism’s narrative structure was formed from legends and the actions of the supernatural, while Soviet Dialecticism’s narrative…

Eisenstein’s films, there is no clear manner of developing the story from shot to shot. In Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein shows huge waves breaking into rock in the very first scenes which montage editing is used. By using this montage technique, it creates a sense that how violent this film is going to be. In addition, showing the movement of water which rises above the rock and crashes back down into it, this image can be also a symbol of the rebellion. However, at the end of the film,…