The Russian Revolution marked the first major
civil war fought in the age of cinema.
And the big winners in that struggle understood
the unique ability of film to change minds
and inflame hearts.
Today, we’ll meet a bunch of filmmakers
who spent as much time studying films as
they did making them.
We’ll see the founding of the world’s
first film school.
And we’ll watch the rise of a cohesive,
self-conscious, and game-changing film movement
that would unlock the power of the cut to
create meaning, shape public opinion, and
call a hungry populace to action.
It’s time to cut...
to Soviet Montage.
[Opening Music Plays]
In 1917, the second of two violent revolts
in Russia, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew
the Tsar and brought the Bolsheviks to power.
“Bolshevik” means “majority” in Russian,
by the way, and this political movement grew
from the peasant and working classes who acquired
their power through persuasion and force.
That’s important.
You should remember that.
Because the resulting government, ruled by
what would become the Communist Party, was
organized around principles of workers’
rights, state control of industry, and the
suppression of dissent.
So the government took a strong interest in
film, because it recognized cinema for what
it was – a powerful tool for social and
political influence.
But before it could get that engine started,
the party had a few obstacles to overcome.
First, it needed to centralize the Russian
film industry.
Prior to the revolution, there were a lot
of production companies, mostly making pro-Tsarist films.
In 1918, the new Bolshevik government did
what Germany had done in creating UFA – which
we talked about last time.
They took over the studios, combining them
to form one state-owned company called Narkompros,
also known as The People’s Commissariat
for Education.
Second, and more importantly, there was virtually
no raw film stock in the country.
You're gonna need film stock if you're gonna make films.
The revolutionary government choked off imports,
and Russia didn’t have the capacity to manufacture
much of its own stock.
So, some enterprising Russian filmmakers took
a different approach.
They started studying films.
What?!?! That’s what you’re doing right now!
And they didn’t just watch them; they dissected them.
Literally.
They took the actual reels of film, cut them
apart, and analyzed them.
How long were the shots?
What was the camera angle?
How was the image composed?
How did they do the thing?
And most importantly, how were the shots edited
together?
In what order, and why?
Then they began experimenting – rearranging
the order of the shots, shortening some, repeating
others – all to see what the effects might
be.
To encourage this experimentation, the government
founded the world’s first film school in 1919.
It was called VGIK, or the State Institute
of Cinematography.
The most well-known and influential teacher
at this new school was the filmmaker Lev Kuleshov.
And his most famous discovery bears his name
and provided his students with the cornerstone
of a new cinematic philosophy.
What he discovered is now known as the Kuleshov
Effect, and it came to light like this:
Kuleshov took a shot of a well-known Russian
matinee idol named Ivan Mosjoukine
staring off-camera with no expression.
He then cut to an image of a bowl of soup,
and then back to the shot of Ivan.
When he asked viewers what Ivan was feeling,
they said he was hungry.
Kuleshov then took the same footage of Ivan,
but this time intercut it with a shot of a
girl in a coffin.
Now, the audience said Ivan felt sad.
Finally, Kuleshov projected the shot of Ivan,
then cut to a woman on a couch.
The viewers said he was feeling desire.
The Kuleshov Effect suggests that viewers
draw more meaning from two shots cut together,
than either shot on its own.
And the Soviet filmmakers believed that
phenomenon was the true power of cinema, something
no other art form can do: juxtapose two images
in real time to create a new, and sometimes
unrelated, meaning.
It’s also one more example of film as an
illusion of reality.
Kuleshov took Georges Méliès one step further:
not only can a cut be used to hide a magic
trick, it is a magic trick!
And that wasn’t Kuleshov’s only contribution.
Or his only illusion.
He also developed a concept called Creative
Geography, also known as Artificial Landscape.
This effect can be created when two segments
of film shot in entirely different locations
are cut together to make them appear to be
happening in a continuous space.
If you’ve watched Doctor Who, this is how
they make it seem like the TARDIS is bigger
on the inside.
Just kidding. It actually is!
We call the overarching theory of film developed
by Kuleshov and his students Soviet Montage.
Montage comes from the French word, meaning
“assembling” or “editing” or... "montage."
And the theory of montage proposes that films
derive their ultimate power and meaning through
the way the shots are cut together – their
order, duration, repetition, and rhythm.
Beyond that, Soviet Montage filmmakers believed
that for film to reach its true potential,
the cuts themselves should be visible.
The audience should be aware of them.
That the illusion should be obviously constructed, and not hidden.
We call this style of editing discontinuity
editing, and it fit quite neatly into another
political idea the Soviet Montage filmmakers
had: that the artist was an engineer, simply
another worker, joining shots the way a brick-layer
builds a wall or a factory worker assembles
a vehicle.
For these folks, the process of filmmaking
was as much a political statement
as the movie itself.
Within Soviet Montage, there are a lot of
ways to juxtapose images.
There’s Intellectual Montage, for example,
which refers to the juxtaposition of two otherwise
unrelated images to create a third idea in
your mind.
This is the purest form of Soviet Montage,
and Kuleshov’s experiment is a perfect example.
Ivan’s face juxtaposed against soup equals
hunger.
Tonal Montage puts together two or more shots
that have similar tonal or thematic qualities.
The idea here is that these shots build on
one another and reinforce the emotional or
psychological meaning the film is trying to
convey..
Two rams butting heads next to a fist next
to people rioting and you’ve got images
that may make you think of conflict.
But, a flower opening next to a baby yawning
next to a sunrise might be beginnings.
To take a great – and decidedly non-Soviet
example – think about Dumbledore’s death
scene in Harry Potter.
The shots between Snape and Dumbledore are
drawn out, still, each wrestling with his
emotions, followed by Dumbledore’s slow-motion
fall.
Metric Montage dictates that shots are cut
after a specified number of frames, regardless
of what’s happening in the shot.
This can be quite jarring, as on-screen actions
are interrupted, but the rhythm of the editing
itself has a psychological effect.
The speeding up or slowing down of edits can
greatly affect the amount of tension the audience
is feeling.
There are moments in the famous shower scene
from Psycho where Hitchcock uses this technique,
cutting between the knife and the victim without
regard for continuity, tone, or musical rhythm.
And, any modern action movie tends to pick
up the pace of the editing as the fight scenes
pick up intensity.
Rhythmic Montage, on the other hand, matches
the cuts to music, sound effects, or action on screen.
Marching feet or beating drums.
Modern movie trailers do this all the time,
using music to link various shots from a movie.
And finally, overtonal Montage is the combination of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage.
One of the best examples of Overtonal Montage
comes from the final stand off in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
we see Tonal Montage in the Mise en Scene. Desert, cracked Earth, tired and weathered faces,
a cemetery, this is the end, death is coming.
[Craig sings theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly]
Rhythmic Montage is pretty obviously used as the scene is punctuated
with cuts of the 3 gunslingers based on the rhythm of Ennio Morricone's incredible score.
Finally, Metric Montage.
We begin the sequence is long cuts
but as the intensity picks up, we cut faster and faster and faster UNTIL!
Now, imagine you’re a Soviet Montage filmmaker,
and you’ve spent months or years studying
films and developing your theories.
What happens when you finally get your hands
on some fresh film stock in the early 1920s?
That’s right.
You start making films with a vengeance.
Not, like, films with "a vengeance" in the title, like Die Hard with A Vengence
but like, you make films with the attitude of vengeance.
One of the most influential Soviet Montage
filmmakers was a former engineering student
named Sergei Eisenstein.
It was Eisenstein’s second feature film,
Battleship Potemkin, that launched him to
international fame and provided a blueprint
for how filmmakers could incorporate Soviet
Montage theories – particularly intellectual
montage – into fiction films.
Made in 1925, Battleship Potemkin tells the
true story of a mutiny aboard a Russian battleship
in 1905.
Rather than focus on a single protagonist,
the film dramatizes the miserable conditions
of the sailors as they toil under officers
who beat them and deprive them of food.
In the film’s most famous section, the Odessa
Steps Sequence, the sailors are cheered on
by the people of Odessa… until Tsarist troops
show up and slaughter the crowd.
The shots themselves are fairly horrifying
– bullet wounds, trampled children, anguished
parents, a baby carriage rolling perilously
through the middle of the battle.
But Eisenstein’s real innovation lies in
the use of montage to bring life to the chaos,
madness, and violence of the action.
Eisenstein wanted the juxtaposition of sometimes-unrelated
images to jolt the audience out of their complacency.
The film is also a powerful piece of propaganda,
which we’ll define as a biased or misleading
communication designed to promote a particular
point of view.
And just because something’s propaganda
doesn’t mean that it’s false.
The Tsarists really did put down a revolt
in Odessa in 1905!
But by making the sailors and civilians so
innocent and the officers and Tsarist troops
so cruel, the film comes down on one side
and stokes the viewer’s outrage against
the other.
We’ve seen this before – in the egregious
re-writing of American history in Birth of
a Nation – and we see it today – in everything
from political ads to issue documentaries.
Film was and remains one of the most powerful
tools of persuasion in the world.
Another Soviet filmmaker who excelled at persuasion,
but took a different approach to montage,
was the documentarian Dziga Vertov.
Vertov began his career as an editor in 1918,
before becoming a cameraman and travelling
around the country taking newsreel footage.
Vertov was an opinionated and rigorous thinker,
and he banded together with other like-minded
documentarians to propose their own ideas
about film.
They called themselves “Kinoki” or “Cinema-Eye”
and
wrote manifestos dissing fiction films.
They believed that only documentaries could
be true and honest.
Vertov’s goal was to use the camera to record
quote-unquote “reality,” and then arrange
his shots using montage to create pure meaning,
rather than tell a story.
His masterwork is The Man with the Movie Camera,
made in 1929.
It follows a day in the life of a city, from
empty streets and sleeping figures through
work and meals and evening traffic.
Actually, the film is as much about the process
of making the film as it is about anything else.
We see the cameraman shooting the footage.
We see the editor, Yelizaveta Svilova, who
was also Vertov’s wife, choosing shots and
cutting them together into sequences that
we then see unfold on screen.
Vertov uses special effects, freeze frames,
special camera rigs, animation, compositing,
even non-linear editing – all the tools
cinema had at the time.
He painted a portrait of his city, its people,
and the artist as an engineer, pulling back
the curtain to reveal the truth of how the
film was made.
But of course, as we’ve talked about, film
is ultimately an illusion of reality, not
reality itself.
Film scholars have long recognized that however
useful Vertov’s theories were in making
films, they don’t account for the fact that
all moving photographs are by nature constructed realities.
Whether they’re in service of a fictional
story or a documentary, they’re chosen and
cut together to articulate a point of view.
Just as there’s very little “reality”
in reality TV, so Vertov’s documentaries
are simply a different use of the magic trick
of film.
As power shifted to Stalin, western films
began to pour back into the U.S.S.R., and
film stock became more readily available.
And the government cooled on the esoteric
Soviet Montage filmmakers.
Audiences wanted something more accessible,
more emotional.
Socialist Realism, which began as a movement
in literature, became the state-supported
style of cinema.
Filmmakers were told to focus on realistic
stories that supported communist values.
A sort of propaganda-through-relatability,
rather than abstract theory.
A prime example of this is the 1935 film Youth
of Maxim.
The story follows a naive, young factory worker
in pre-Revolutionary Russia who helps his
colleagues hide a subversive teacher from
the police.
Over the course of the film, the young man
is radicalized and eventually joins the Revolution.
Rather than use jarring cuts and juxtaposition,
the film relies on a much more smooth, mainstream
style, encouraging viewers to identify with
the character and buy into the reality of
the story.
That brought an end to the Soviet Montage
movement.
As often happens, however, the techniques
developed by the Soviet Montage filmmakers
continue to influence cinema to this day,
in everything from the shower scene in Psycho,
to the latest music video.
And movie trailers… pretty much all the
movie trailers.
Today we learned how the Russian Revolution
led to a subsequent revolution in cinema.
We talked about how the Soviet Montage filmmakers
believed editing was the most foundational
element of film technique.
We looked at some of the filmmakers who put
those theories into practice, and how their
films worked as state-sponsored propaganda.
Next time, we’ll cross back to Hollywood
to witness the Golden Silent Era and the rise
of the studio system – where movies were
made as art, entertainment, and commerce,
more often than political statements – as
the story of film continues.
Crash Course Film History is produced in association
with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check
out a playlist of their latest amazing shows,
like Brain Craft, It’s Okay to Be Smart,
and Physics Girl.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Studio with the
help of all these nice Kinoki and our amazing
graphics team, is Thought Cafe.
