Soviet Montage

After the Russian Revolution in October 1917, the New Soviet government faced a difficult task of handling different sectors of life and like other industries; the film industry took several years to rebuild outputs both in production and distribution that could help serve the aims of the new government.

During World War I, there were a number of private production companies operating in Moscow and Petersburg and since imports were cut off, these companies did well in making films catering the domestic market. These film companies resisted on following the new policy made after the Revolution to nationalize all private properties. And in July 1918, when the government’s film subsection of the State Commission of Education put strict controls on the existing supplies of raw film stock, the largest firms fled to other countries, taking all the equipment they could.

Having to face equipment shortages and living in difficult conditions, a bunch of young filmmakers made moves that soon result to a national cinema movement. Dziga Vertov began working on documentaries of the war and soon handled new reels at the age of 20. Lev Kuleshov, who was teaching in the newly founded State School on Cinema Art, did a series of experiments by editing together different footage from different sources into a whole to create an impression of continuity.

Kuleshov was the most conservative among the young Soviet filmmakers since he was trying to systematize principles of editing similar to the continuity practices in classical Hollywood. Thus, even before they were able to make films, Kuleshov and his young pupils were working at the world’s first film school and writing theoretical essays on the new art form. This grounding in theory would be the basis of the Montage style.

In 1920, Sergei Eisenstein worked briefly in a train carrying propaganda to the troops in the Civil War and returned the same year to Moscow to stage plays in a worker’s theatre. In May 1920, Vsevolod Pudovkin made his acting debut in a play presented by Kuleshov’s State Film School. American films, particularly those of D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford, were a tremendous influence on the filmmakers of the emerging Soviet movement.

None of the important filmmakers of the Montage style was a veteran of the pre-Revolutionary industry. All came from other fields and discovered cinema in the midst of the Revolution’s ferment.

In 1921, as the country faces tremendous problems, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP), which for several years permitted private management of business. For film, the NEP meant a sudden reappearance of film stock and equipment belonging to the producers who had not emigrated. And slowly, Soviet production began to grow as private firms made more films.

Since Lenin saw film as a powerful tool for education, the first films encouraged by the government were documentaries and newsreels such as Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda, which began in May 1922.

The Soviet Montage style displayed tentative beginnings in 1924, with Kuleshov’s class from the State Film School presenting The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. In the next few years, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, and the Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko created a series of films that are classics of the Montage style.

In their writings and films, these directors championed the powers of editing. Inspired by films from Hollywood and the French Impressionists who told stories from fast cutting, the young Soviet directors declared that a film’s power comes from a combination of shots through montage.

However, not all theorists agreed on what the montage approach to editing should be. But, their approach to narrative form set them apart from other cinemas of other countries. Soviet narrative films tend to downplay character psychology as a cause; instead, social forces provided the major causes which made characters interesting for the way these social causes affected their lives. As a result, Soviet Montage movement films did not always have a single protagonist. Soviet filmmakers often avoided well-known actors, and would cast part by searching out non-actors. This practice was called typage.

The decline of the Soviet movement was not caused primarily by industrial and economic factors. Instead, the government strongly discouraged the use of the Montage Style. By the late 1920s, Vertov, Eisenstein and Dovzhenko were being criticized for their excessive formal and esoteric approaches.

Eisenstein still continued his work on Montage but occasionally incurred the wrath of the authorities up until his death in 1948. As a movement, the Soviet Montage style can be said to have ended by l933, with the release of such films as Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931) and Pudovkin’s Deserter ( 1933).

 

(Notes from the book Film Art by Bordwell and Thompson)

The New Hollywood and Independent Film Making

Midway through the 60’s, the Hollywood industry seemed to be doing very well, with the release of blockbusters such as The Sound of Music in 1965 and Dr. Zhivago on the same year, generating huge profits. However, problems soon arose. Expensive studio projects failed miserably, TV networks stopped bidding for pictures and American movie attendance flattened out causing Hollywood companies to lose over $200 million annually by the year 1969.

The producers had to fight back to stop the fast declining industry. One strategy was to produce a counter culture-flavored film aimed at young people. The most popular and influential films they produced were Dennis Hopper’s low-budget Easy Rider (1969) and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* (1970). However, other “youthpix” about campus revolution and unorthodox lifestyles proved disappointing at the box office.

What helped the industry’s fortunes were films aimed squarely at broader audience such as Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), George Lucas’s American Graffiti
(1913), Star Wars (1977), Brian De Palma Obsession, (1976) and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, 1976 and Raging Bull, 1980). These directors came to be known as the movie brats. Instead of coming up through the ranks of the studio system, most had gone to film schools. They had not only mastered the mechanic of production but also learned about film aesthetics and history.

Unlike Hollywood directors from earlier times, the movie brats had encyclopedic knowledge of great movies and directors and produced some personal, highly self-conscious films as had been the case with the French New Wave. The movie brats worked in traditional genres but they do tried to give them autobiographical coloring by incorporating reflections from their childhood lives and even obsessions.

Since movies had been a major part of the young directors’ lives, many films of the New Hollywood were based on the old Hollywood. At the same time, many directors admired the European tradition just like Robert Altman and Woody Allen, who in quite different ways, displayed creative attitudes fed by European cinema. Altman and Allen were of a slightly older generation, but many movie brats proved to be the most continuously successful directors of the era.

Lucas and Spielberg became powerful producers, working together on the Indiana Jones series and personifying Hollywood’s new generation. Coppola failed to sustain his own studio, but he remained an important director. Scorsese’s reputation rose steadily, and by the end of the 1980s, he was the most critically acclaimed living American filmmaker. During the 1980s, fresh talents won recognition, creating a New Hollywood. Many of the biggest hits of the decade continued to come from Lucas and Spielberg, but other, somewhat younger directors were successful: James Cameron, Tim Burton and Robert Zemeckis.

The resurgence of mainstream film was also fed by filmmakers from outside Hollywood. During the 1980s and 1990s, more women filmmakers also became commercially successful. Several directors from independent film managed to shift into the mainstream, making medium-budget pictures with widely known stars. The New Hollywood also absorbed some minority directors from independent film. Still other directors remained independent and more or less marginal to the studios.

Stylistically, no single coherent film movement emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. The most mainstream of the young directors continued the tradition of classical American cinema. Continuity editing remained the norm, with clear signals for time shifts and new plot developments. Some directors embellished Hollywood’s traditional storytelling strategies with new or revived visual techniques. Less well funded Hollywood film making cultivated more flamboyant styles. Several of the newer entrants into Hollywood enriched mainstream conventions of genre, narrative, and style.

While in the 1980s and 1990s younger studio directors adapted classical conventions to modern tastes, an energetic independent film tradition began pushing the envelope. By the end of the 1990s, the two trends were merging in surprising ways. As independent films began to win larger audiences, major studios eagerly acquired distribution companies such as Miramax and October Films. Much media journalism fostered the impression that Hollywood was being destroyed by independent filmmaking, but in fact, more and more, the major studios controlled audiences’ access to formerly independent productions.

At the start of the new century, many of the most thrilling Hollywood films were being created by a stronger new generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s and brought up on videotape, video games, and the Internet. Like their predecessors, these directors were reshaping the formal and stylistic conventions of the classical cinema while also making their innovations accessible to a broad audience.

(Notes from the book Film Art by Bordwell and Thompson)

French Impressionism and Surrealism

Impressionism is an avant-garde style that opened largely within the film industry. Most of the impressionist filmmakers started out working for major French companies and some of their avant-garde works proved financially successful. In the mid-1920s, most formed their own independent companies but remained within the mainstream commercial industry by renting studio facilities and releasing their films through established firms.

Allied with the Surrealist movement in other arts, these filmmakers relied on their own means and private patronage. France in the 1920s offers a striking instance of how different film movements may coexist at the same time and place.

IMPRESSIONISM

World War I struck a serious blow to the French film industry wherein film studios were shifted to wartime uses and much of the export was halted. However, two major firms, Pathé Frères and Léon Gaumont also controlled circuits of theaters. With the need to fill vacant screens, American films began increasingly to flood into France in 1915. The Hollywood cinema dominated the market by the end of 1917. After the war, French filmmaking never fully recovered. The film industry tried several ways to recapture the market, mostly through imitation of Hollywood production methods and genres. However, the most significant move was the firm’s encouragement of younger French directors: Abel Gance, Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L’Herbier and Jean Epstein.

These younger filmmakers proclaimed cinema was an art comparable to poetry, painting and music. They said that cinema should stand on its own and should not borrow from theater or literature. Cinema should not be an occasion for the artist to express feelings. The young French filmmakers and other tangential members of the movement sought to put this aesthetic into practice as filmmakers.

Between 1918 and 1928, through a series of extraordinary films, the younger directors experimented with cinema in ways that posed an alternative to the dominant Hollywood formal principles. Given the centrality of emotion in their aesthetic, it is no wonder that the intimate psychological narrative dominated their filmmaking practice. The interactions of a few characters, usually love triangles, would serve as the basis for the filmmaker’s exploration of fleeting moods and shifting sensations.

In Hollywood cinema, psychological causes were important. But the school gained the name Impressionist because of its interest in giving narration considerable psychological depth, revealing the play of a character’s consciousness. The interest falls not on external psychological behavior but on inner action.

Impressionist films manipulated plot time and subjectivity. To depict memories, flashbacks are common. Even more striking is the film’s insistence on registering character’s dreams, fantasies and mental states. Impressionism’s emphasis or personal emotion gives the film’s narratives an intensely psychological focus.

The filmmakers experimented with ways of rendering mental states by means of cinematography and editing. In Impressionist films, irises, masks and superimpositions function as traces of characters’ thoughts and feelings. To intensify the subjectivity, the Impressionists’ cinematography and editing present characters’ perceptual experience, their optical impressions. These films use a great deal of point-of-view cutting.

The Impressionists also experimented with pronounced rhythmic editing to suggest the pace of an experience as a character feels it, moment by moment. Several Impressionist films use a dance to motivate a markedly accelerated cutting rhythm. More generally, the comparison of cinema to music encouraged the subjective shooting and editing patterns function within impressionist films to reinforce the narrative treatment of psychological states.

Impressionist form created certain demands on film technology. The most influential Impressionist technological innovation was the development of new means of frame mobility. Such formal, stylistic and technological innovations had given French filmmakers the hope that their films could win the popularity granted to Hollywood’s product.

During the 1920s, the Impressionists operated somewhat independently and formed their own production companies. Some impressionist films did prove moderately popular with French audiences. But by 1929, most foreign audiences had not taken to Impressionism and its experimentation was attuned to elite tastes. In addition, although production costs were rising, some Impressionists became even more free-spending. As a result, filmmakers’ companies either went out of business or were absorbed by big firms.

Impressionism may be said to have ended by 1929 but its influences- psychological narrative, subjective camera work and editing, long-lived and continued to operate in Hollywood montage sequences and in certain American genres and styles (horror films and film noir).

SURREALISM

While the French Impressionist filmmakers worked within the commercial film industry, the Surrealist filmmakers relied on private patronage, and screened their works in small artists’ gatherings. Such isolation is hardly surprising since Surrealist cinema was a more radical movement, producing films that perplexed and shocked most audiences.

Surrealist cinema was directly linked to Surrealism in literature and painting. Influenced by Freudan psychology, Surrealist art sought to register the hidden currents of the unconscious, “in the absence of any control exercised by reason and beyond any aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”

As Surrealism developed during 1924-1929, automatic writing and painting, the search for bizarre or evocative imagery, the deliberate avoidance of rationality explicable form or style became its features. Surrealists were attracted to cinema, especially admiring films that presented untamed desire or the fantastic and marvelous. Soon enough, painters such as Man Ray and Salvador Dali and writers such as Antonin Artaud began dabbling in cinema and the young Spaniard Luis Buñuel became its most famous filmmaker.

Surrealist cinema is overtly anti-narrative, attacking causality itself. If rationality is to be fought, causal connections among events must be dissolved.

Many Surrealist films tease us to find a narrative logic that is simply absent. Causality is as evasive as in a dream. Instead, we find events juxtaposed for their disturbing effect. An Impressionist film would motivate such event as a character’s dreams or hallucinations, but in these films, character psychology is all but nonexistent. Sexual desire and ecstasy, violence, blasphemy and bizarre humor furnish events that Surrealist film form employs with a disregard for conventional narrative principles.

The style of Surrealist cinema is eclectic. Mise-en-scene is often influenced by Surrealist painting. Surrealist film style refused to canonize any particular devices, since that would order and rationalize what had to be an “undirected play of thought.”

By late 1929, Surrealists were embroiled in internal dissension about whether communism was a political equivalent of Surrealism. After 1930, French Surrealism was no longer viable individual Surrealists continued to work; the most famous was Beñuel who continued to work in his own brand of the Surrealist style for 50 years.

(Notes from the book Film Art by Bordwell and Thompson)

German Expressionism

In the beginning of World War I, German film output was small. Their 2000 movie theaters showcased foreign films as German films were banned in the US and in France. But in 1916, the German government banned foreign films as a support to the industry and opposes the competition as well as to create their own propaganda films. Film companies increased to more than a hundred however, government policies encouraged these companies to merge into a cartel.

In late 1917, a large company named the UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellshaft), which was created by the government, the Deutsche Bank and other large industrial companies, emerged to promote pro-war films. Because of the huge financial back up that UFA has, they were able to hire superb technicians and build the best equipped studios in Europe that soon later attracted foreign filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock. During the 1920s, Germany coproduced many films with other countries which helped spread the German stylistic influence.

The German film industry concentrated on 3 genres: internationally popular adventure serial (spy rings, clever detectives or exotic settings), brief sex exploitation cycle (“educationally” with such topics as homosexuality and prostitution). Also, UFA copied the popular Italian historical epics of the prewar period. The last type of film was proven to be the most successful. In 1919, Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry, an epic of the French revolution helped reopen the world film market to Germany (released as Passion in the US). In 1923, he became the first German director hired in Hollywood.

 

Some film companies remained briefly independent such as Erich Pommer’s Decla which was later known Decla Bioscop. In 1919, the firm produced a script from two unknowns, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz who wanted the film to be made in an unusually stylized way. The designers assigned to the film, Hermann Wann, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig, suggested that it should be done in an Expressionist style. As an avant-garde movement, Expressionism had first been important in painting and been quickly taken up in theater, which the company officials consented to try in cinema.

 

This belief was proved to be correct when the inexpensive film, The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari created a sensation in Berlin, then in the US, France and the other countries. Because of its success, other films in the Expressionist style soon followed. Other experimental filmmakers created abstract films. Soon enough, the UFA absorbed Decla Bioscop in 1921 and invested in Expressionist films because these could compete with the US. And in the mid 1920s, German films became the best in the world.

 

As French Impressionism focused on cinematography and editing, German Expressionism on the other hand, took notice on the mise-en-scene. Shapes
were distorted and exaggerated unrealistically for expressive purposes. Actors often wear heavy makeup and move in jerky or slow, sinuous patterns. All elements of the mise-en-scene interact graphically to create an overall composition and characters do not simply exist within a setting but rather form visual elements that merge with the setting.

 

In the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Calligari, Expressionist stylization functions to convey the distorted viewpoint of a madman; we see the world as the hero does. This narrative function of the settings becomes explicit at one point, when the hero enters an asylum in his pursuit of Caligari. The world of the film is literally a projection of the hero’s vision. Expressionism often functioned to create stylized situations of fantasy and horror stories and depend greatly on set designers.

 

 

However, in 1924, US Dawes Plan helped stabilize the German economy causing foreign films to come in quickly offering a degree of composition. Expressionist budgets increased and drove UFA to financial difficulty leading Erich Pommer to quit and try his luck in the US. Germans began to imitate US products, diluted with the unique qualities of Expressionism style.

Eventually, in 1927, Expressionism died out. But because of the German filmmakers who moved to Hollywood, films that they made there also displayed expressionist tendencies. Horror films and film noir have strong expressionist tendencies in their lighting and settings. Although the German movement only lasted for a few years, expressionism continues to linger as a trend in film style.

(Notes from the book Film Art by Bordwell and Thompson)