PROTOTYPE 05 Montage cinema revived by the EMO-Synth
project outline The concept of montage cinema was conceived by a number of Russian filmmakers in the 1920s and its core ideas were rooted in the Soviet revolution a couple of years prior. Different filmmakers, such as Vertov, Pudovkin and Kuleshov, all had quite different ideas about what montage cinema ought to be. Therefore the word “montage”, which literally means editing, is used to describe the Russian cinema of the 1920s. In this project though, we started off with the theories and views of Sergej Eisenstein who claimed that montage was “the very essence of cinema”. His idea of “montage cinema” was that filmmakers needed to compose a series of exciting events in order to emotionally stimulate the viewer. This meant that individual shots couldn’t just follow each other, but had to collide. He denounced the classical Hollywood way of editing in which temporal and spatial continuity were quintessential. Shots had to be opposed to one another instead in a ‘dialectical way’. This idea was derived from the Marxist theory in which thesis and anti-thesis combined into syn-thesis and thus determined the course of history. This collision of shots could be based on conflicts of scale, volume, motion and speed, both within and between different frames. These conflicts result in a new mental concept which forms itself inside the viewer’s mind. This mental concept cannot originate from the different shots coexisting, but emerges from the overall interaction between shots. This enabled the director to raise abstract concepts, such as specific emotions, in the mind of the audience. Genuine emotions could not be felt
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through emphatic identification with an actor/actress playing a certain role and acting out an emotion. True emotions could only be felt by the viewer through the dialectical process of images colliding and thereby generating meaning, superseding the sum of its parts. A frequently used example to explain this theory of how cinema works is the famous scene from Eisenstein’s film Strike in which we see workers who are on strike and then get attacked by law enforcement agencies. Subsequently we see bulls who are guided towards the slaughter-house. The juxtaposition of these shots creates a metaphor in the viewers mind about the workers being treated as cattle and stirs up rage and discord about the way the workers are humiliated. The metaphor in this example acts as a catalyst of emotions that could not have been set off by merely showing images of the workers and the reaction of the establishment to their uprising against the system.