Citizen Kane, Rocky, Scarface and Commando all use montages, if in a slightly less intensive form than its Russian creators intended. Produced in 1925 and premiered in January 1926, the film was a watershed moment in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. This technique changed the way film integrated time and space and evolved into the ‘montage’ we know today and that is seen so much throughout cinema history. The Battleship Potemkin ( Bronenosets Potmkin) is Sergei Eisenstein’s second feature film. Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch 'The Battleship Potemkin has been so famous for so long that it is almost impossible to come to it with a fresh eye. The hero here was ‘the people’ and many of the film’s leading characters weren’t given names in an aim to unify the main players. As such his films rarely focused on one protagonist alone. In this type of montage, the shots also do not have to make sense within the context of the film. In many of his films, including Battleship Potemkin (1925), he combines a mix of shots to make a political statement. This jarring style was also used as a medium through which to ‘educate’ the working classes. Eisenstein’s favorite soviet montage was when a series of shots have a deeper meaning. Sergei Eisenstein’s work ( Battleship Potemkin, most famously) was inspired by Kuleshov and refused to spoonfeed audiences, cutting between random imagery to make viewers decipher an idea or feeling. It was a new style of editing that spurned capitalism by going against the smooth, romantic editing prolific at the time and generally stirred up the creative juices of directors everywhere. The director intercut shots of faces with related images to generate an emotional response in his spectators. Eisenstein is able to elicit emotion from his audience through the way in which he juxtaposes, pairs, and paces his images, thereby mirroring the purpose of his propaganda: displaying the conflict between the ruling classes and. ![]() ![]() ![]() It all kicked off when Russian director-cum-theorist Lev Kuleshov realised that an actor’s expression wasn’t enough to convey a specific idea, therefore juxtaposed images must. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, Battleship Potemkin, is one which rises to a heady, feverish pitch through the repeated juxtaposition of images throughout the film. What is it? Even if you’ve never seen a 1920s Russian film (what have you been doing with your life?), you’ll still have noticed one of the most recognisable editing techniques in film history: the montage. Key filmmakers: Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov
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