First off, for those who haven't seen it in awhile, let's refresh our memories:
Scroll down 2/3's of the way down this page to watch the ODESSA STEPS.
This, in fact, the absolute core and essence of what it was that I was talking about above as "kinetic celebrations" and referred here to as "rhythmic montage". Here the editing operates in total conflict with the rhythms occuring onscreen, creating tension, dynamism, suspense. Take the famous moment when the baby's mother is hit by the bullet-- note the amount of time Eisenstein inserts into the simple process of her falling to the ground and losing grip of the carriage. This is not proscenium style acting in high emotional style, swooning at length to ham it up. This is Eisenstein demanding take after take, stretching the moment of "falling to the ground" into an impossibly long period. How many times does the woman react to the gunshot & begin to fall? I count ten cuts. How many times does the wheel of the baby carriage pass the "tipping point" by moving over the step edge whereby it should go immediately careening down? I count five cuts.
This is the unnatural repetition that I was talking about above, the silent film equivalent of revving a dragster time and time again before tearing out down the road. Eisenstein is creating a dynamism that causes you to cringe-- the scene is pure montage, picking out a wheel here, gloves cringing a wound there, boots marching, guns firing, people scattering, boots marching again, the woman hit, etc etc in rapid montage for tempo.
This technique was completely abandoned by the time of his sound works because the action is, in this particular case of kinetic/rhythmic montage which was used in the same films as his intellectual (i e symbolic-mosaic) montage, employed while representing realtime action...
yet is not true to realtime. What is dynamic realtime exposition throughout a silent film becomes surreal in a talkie. It's like trying to put words in the mouth of a sculpture.
What is it that makes the Odessa steps sequence memorable? Do people see the film and make films with thousands upon thousands of gratutious content-extrapolating edits? Of course not. First off "The baby carriage tumbling down the Odessa Steps, which has nothing to with the technique, has influenced every narrative director in the world," is not only completely in error about "having nothing to do with the technique" but certainly an exaggeration regarding it's influence. The film was extremely impressive in it's time and certainly inspired some filmmakers like Dreyer to his greatest heights in JOAN... but this is a silent film (with far fewer cuts and far less radical editing). We see almost no use in the contemporary melodramatic cinema of this device by any filmmaker in the sound era. The sequence retains it's power to stand out today
because of the melodrama and pathos of the moment, with the technique (for once) employed to very deeply emotional and instinctual ends, rather than in terms of pure cinematic/experimental tour de force exposition of directorial power, let's face it. When we see it being tributed here and there (as in THE UNTOUCHABLES) we see the pathos of not-wanting-a-baby-to-die being stretched impossibly in standard editing... not extreme montage editing technique in modern filmmaking. Pure distilled pathos: which takes us to Eisenstein's master-- Griffith. The baby under the police horse in STRIKE; the massacre/slaughtering of the bull sequence in same. The Odessa sequence in POTEMKIN. The killing of the horse on the drawbridge in OCTOBER. These moments of slaughter and high pathos became stock climactic punctuation in silent Eisenstein, with the Odessa sequence being the perfect fundamental marriage between his avant garde montage theories and a dramatic subject. Were he to execute the same cutting tempo of alternation rhythym, repetition, holding, etc, for a battle between two faceless armies or battleships, the scene wouldn't stand out from the rest of the film, which is assembled with the same tour de force innovation.
And indeed these dramatic usages (the mother and the baby carriage, the other mother getting blown clean away with her young son in her arms), were learned, more than any other place, at the feet of his idol, Griffith, who taught him by example to establish archtypically blemish-free Innocence, confronted by an all obliterating evil... with the tempo of the editing operating to serve these sentimentalist ends (as well as completely distorting history to suit
ideological goals). It's in these unusually emotional scenes that Eisenstein is most clearly building on his influence by Griffith, one of the most sentimental filmmakers, period.
From Videomaker
Quote:
The Montage
Eisenstein's great contribution to the world of editing is the montage: a series of related images presented in sequence to convey an emotional message to an audience. The best example of a montage from Potemkin is known as the "Odessa Steps" sequence.
From HOLT via NY Film Annex Quote:
“The film contains in the massacre on the Odessa Steps (an invention of Eisenstein's)--one of the most memorable and exciting sequences in all cinema. The rapid montage, and the effects devised by using a trolley and a camera strapped to the waist of an acrobat, still take the breath away. The film that put Soviet Cinema and Eisenstein on the international map.' Holt's Foreign Film Guide
A
wonderful page on the film from the Catholic University of America's Faculty Page Quote:
Montage--juxtaposing images by editing--is unique to film (and now video). During the 1920s, the pioneering Russian film directors and theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov demonstrated the technical, aesthetic, and ideological potentials of montage. The 'new media' theorist Lev Manovich has pointed out how much these experiments of the 1920s underlie the aesthetics of contemporary video.
Eisenstein believed that film montage could create ideas or have an impact beyond the individual images. Two or more images edited together create a "tertium quid" (third thing) that makes the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Eisenstein's greatest demonstration of the power of montage comes in the "Odessa Steps" sequence of his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. On the simplest level, montage allows Eisenstein to manipulate the audience's perception of time by stretching out the crowd's flight down the steps for seven minutes, several times longer than it would take in real time:
(pics, see page)
The rapid progression and alternation of images gives a sensational event even greater visceral impact:
(more pics)
The famous sequence involving a runaway baby carriage shows Eisenstein using montage to arouse both emotion and ideological consciousness among the film's viewers:
(pics)
At the conclusion of the Odessa Steps sequence, two sequences of images illustrate the notion of the 'tertium quid' as well as the ideological potential of montage. In the first sequence below, the rapid montage of the three cherubs makes the small angel seem to be throwing a punch. In the second sequence, three shots of stone lions, shown rapidly in succession, indicate awakening militancy. In Potemkin, both montages represent a call to the people to rise up against oppression.
And Eisensteins later, sound film, so-called "vertical" or contrapuntal montage-- i e his Mickey Mousing to the soundtrack-- was scarcely his innovation, was in existence far prior to his employment of it, and I find his attachment of the word "montage" to the technique a bit cheeky. What distinguish NEVSKY and his IVAN series lie primarily outside of experimentation within the editing room.