Advanced Editing Notes: Soviet Montage & Realism

3) Soviet Montage and Formalism

Constructive editing is the idea that is used in editing where each shot should make new points to reveal the story. He felt that the importance lay in the relationship between objects or people and through this, new meanings are created. He believed that the close-ups were "too close to reality" and did not create meaning and so he edited with close-ups to relate the narrative. The Kuleshov effect is an idea that states that the juxtaposition, or relationship based on placement, precedes the actor's emotions. He believed that only through the juxtaposition of characters would the emotions produced by the actors have any significance. Kuleshov believed that cinema ideas should be communicated through fragments of detail put together to produce an idea. Eisenstein believed that life was in constant change and therefore, it should be communicated through the medium of film. He used incomplete shots in the edit and not necessarily linked and the two images are synthesized together to introduce a new idea. In the "Odessa Step" sequence, we can see this technique used through the shots that are not all related in the sense of continuity, but instead, it jumps around from person to person to provide more of a universal coverage of the event.


4. Andre Bazin and Realism

Andre Bazin saw Classical film making as a way to manipulate the audience and deprive them of their own decisions in order to create their own individual meaning. He believed that the editing forces the audience to think a certain way and make the audience's decision for them, depriving them of the privilege to interpret the film as and art, something perceived from multitudes of perspectives. According to Bazin, incorporating a wider range of view in the cinema, it provides the audience with much more to interpret. He believed that through this lack of emphasis on certain aspects of the shots, individuals are given the opportunity to observe what they think is important and create their own opinion where as Classicism was too guiding and not revealing enough. Realism uses deep focus to show the entire shot instead of selectively choosing what to emphasize. This was to create a deeper sense of reality in the film.  Realists, instead of relying on cutting, used long takes, panning, focus (deep) , tilting, long shots, wide screen, craning, and tracking to create relationships between a point "a" to a point "b", or to reveal more in a shot instead of focusing and emphasizing a certain aspect of the shot.