Soviet Montage and Formalism x Andre Bazin and Realism

Soviet Montage and Formalism

     Vsevolod Pudovkin's "constructive editing" argued that each shot should be of new significance to the story. This should be done, he believed, not by the shot itself but in its placement. For example, he perceived D.W. Griffith's use of close-ups as meaningless; his close-ups, however, were carefully placed along with other specific details in montage so as to express his messages. Essentially, in formalism the most important part of filmmaking is not the material, but how it is utilized.

     Similarly to his student Pudovkin's idea of constructive editing, Lev Kuleshov believed that cinematic messages stem from smaller details placed together. This is reflected in the Kuleshov effect: emotional meaning (and the viewer's formation of it) are reliant on the filmmaker's juxtaposition of the shots as opposed to the actor's performance. He performed an experiment with amateur actors to reinforce this belief. A proponent of this concept is Alfred Hitchcock; for example, in Rear Window, protagonist LB Jeffries spies on his courtyard neighbors; the shots are placed so as to imply specific emotions.

     Sergei Eisenstein believed that life was constantly in a state of change and to this end applied it to his filmmaking. In editing, he used incomplete shots that held significance to the overall film as opposed to themselves-Eisensteinian montage. This technique is applied in Battleship Potemkin's "Odessa Step Sequence" in that the cuts are out of continuity and not necessarily related; instead, there are shots and reaction shots of several characters, allowing for a greater sense of the general attitude of the characters.

Andre Bazin and Realism

     Andre Bazin's dislike of classical and formalistic films was due to their uses of editing. In Bazin's opinion, editing a scene rendered it ineffective because it was unrealistic in that its meanings were determined as opposed to ambiguous. Furthermore, he thought that formalists, in creating the meanings of/for their scenes, were manipulating the audience and thus preventing them from formulating their own meanings.

     In filmmaking, realists strive mainly for allowing the audience to interpret their work in their own ways. This is accomplished by intentional ambiguity and not emphasizing any specific aspects of their film.

     The techniques the filmmakers use to achieve the above rely heavily on cinematography and NOT editing, or doing so as little as possible. Said cinematography includes long shots, wide screen, lengthy takes, deep focus, panning, craning, or tilting rather than cutting. These allow the audience to make observations and make based opinions instead of being guided to the filmmakers's desired reactions.