Montage, The Russians

Russian Revolution (1917)
Two revolutions happened in Russia that set the formation of the soviet union. Civil unrest caused by government corruption, food shortages, Russia's involvement in world war one. led to a revolt forcing the abdication of Nikolai II. The new government was then overthrown by the Bolshevicks, led by Vladimir Lenin. This revolution demanded the use of propaganda.
After the Revolution, filmmakers experimented with old films to see what would happen if they put them together in different ways. Lenin believed film could instruct the illiterate masses and established estate workshops to make film a powerful tool of instruction of propaganda.

Lev Kuleshov
Pionner film theorist Les Kuleshov Studied the techniques of Hollywood directors, particularly D.W Griffiths and introduced crosscutting and montage into Russian cinema. He used the archives of old silent movies for his own cutting experiments (destroying most of the film archives in the process)
Kuleshov found that people would respond to a shot differently depending on the order of the images. This would achieve new meaning.

Sergei Eisenstien
Eisenstien's Innovative film style was heavily influenced by cultural currents that emerged after the Russian Revolution. He designed propaganda posters to help keep up morale while in the Red Army.
He attended Kuleshov's workshop. His second film The Battleship Potemkin (1905) was commissioned by the government of the Soviet Union to commemorate the uprisings in Russia in 1905. the film had the famous scene of The Odessa Steps. The viewer experience the mental confusion of the people on the steps. It mirrors the ways our attention would jump from one perception to another in a state of panic.

Sergei Einstien Methods of Montage:
Metric- Based purely on timing
Rhythmic - Cutting for continuity or by the content within the frame (movement)
Tonal - Lights/Shapes/Shadow to influence the emotional response
Overtonal - Combination of Metric, Rhythmic and tonal
Intellectual - Where the above methods seeks to evoke emotional response, to express ideas by creating relationships between opposing visual images.

Dziga Vertov
He originally worked as newsreel cameraman. he believed the world is seen more clearly through the eye of the camera than the human eye and cinema should be real and truthful. he even disagreed with the theory of narrative film made by Einstein, and he believed that conventional fiction storytelling was corrupting.
He cut film images together to create thematic connections or for emotional effects of juxtaposition. He also attempted to create a unique language of cinema that wasn't influence by other theatricals and artificial lighting, to show cinema that captured real life.
His work was unmatched till the era of music video, however his work and theories influenced the documentary realism (cinema verite) in the 1960's.
He coined the term Kino Eye (Film Eye)

Vsevolod Pudovkin
Pudovkin theorized that the actors on screen do not really act, that its the context in which gives us an emotional response. which is something that can be established by montage. He believed that montage operated differently from the way Eisenstien made it out to be. Pudovkin believed that montage was not a collision of frames, but a linkage of frames.

Important Films to note with montage:
Kuleshov Effect
Strike (1925) By Sergei Eisenstien
North by Northwest (1959) By Alfred Hitchcock
Naked Gun (1988) By David Zucker
Team America (2004) By Trey Parker
Man with a movie Camera (1929) By Dziga Vertov
Soviet Toys (1924) By Dziga Vertov
The Battleship Potemkin (1925) By Sergei Eisenstien