However, film theorist Andre Bazin thought that cinema depended on reality. The film shows the city and it’s people waking up, the the effects of this. This is the contradiction of all documentary it aims to show reality, but in fact the moment you put a camera in front of people they begin to behave differently. Everyone seems to be self aware and self conscious of the camera. It emphasises the individual rather than society, such as the drunks and homeless individuals shown sleeping rough. Man with a Movie Camera is an example of soviet montage. This led Kuleshov to conclude that viewer response is less a product of the individual shot than of the meaning generated from juxtaposing shot in the editing – the montage process. Actually the footage of Mosjoukine was the same shot repeated over and over again. The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mosjoukine’s face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was “looking at” the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Also the Kuleshov effect, where Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of a man was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, a little girl’s coffin). Montage has also been used creatively, such as Lev Kuleshov’s ‘creative geography,’ where he used editing to make two entirely different places appear as one place on film. Murray Smith said ‘classic realism presents a selective view of the world as if it wee a necessary, inevitable one, and so inhibits both psychic freedom and any impetus towards progressive social change.’ It was used as a propaganda tool to educate and inform the working class, but also as a means of expressing and evolving working class subjectivity. The editing can be described as being like bricks the director is using it to build a story. To do this, film theorists such as Vertov demanded that film makers abandon the conventions of popular cinema in order to create new forms that would foster an active engagement in the film, such as montage where the editing is for dynamic tension, not for continuity as in classic Hollywood films. The Realist Manifesto 1922 claimed that ‘art is the realisation of our spatial perception of the world,’ and that the artist ‘constructs his work as an engineer builds bridges.’ It wants to make visible what was previously invisible, eg. It presents a documontage style of issues in society and believes that the artist is an engineer who’s job it is to build the foundations of a new society. It became called ‘constructivism’ – a mode of art that is socially useful/ aesthetic innovation for political ends. However, film became seen as socially useful and was considered a powerful means of communication and expression, one that could carry the revolutionary message to a massively scattered populace. Many film makers fled the country and the soviet government found it hard to control the industry. The Russian film industry was virtually destroyed by the Russian revolution 1917. Artistically, the 1920’s were considered the golden age of soviet cinema, the peak of modernist and avant-garde. Though montage is regularly seen in modern Hollywood cinema, it was a radical notion in the 1920’s when film mostly used long takes, around 8-11 seconds. Soviet montage is hugely political and aimed to change societies. ‘Montage’ refers to a process of editing film material where camera shots are used to create an impression of movement in a scene, by cutting and changing the cameras position.
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