International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) trained as an engineer and worked in the theater, but is also known for his teaching and prolific writing, e.g., on the theory and practice of film montage. This writing is in places elegantly violent in style and intention and supportive of the 1917 revolutions, as shown in Eisenstein's explanation of what mid-1920s Soviet cinema should do: “The Soviet Cinema should smash into the skull… To smash with our cine-fist into skulls, to smash through to the final victory and now, under the threat of the influx of … petty bourgeois philistinism into the Revolution, to smash as never before!” (quoted in Nesbet 2003 : 49). At its most basic, montage is a matter of juxtaposing shots in unexpected ways so as to create new meanings and make film viewers understand concepts (abstract or not) that would have eluded them in a mimetic or realist filmic depiction of reality ( Nichols 2005 ). Battleship Potemkin , Eisenstein's first and most celebrated film, foregrounds montage but needs to be understood first and foremost within the contexts of czarist Russia and the 1917 Revolution. At the turn of the twentieth century, the powerless Russian intelligentsia (a nineteenth-century-educated class made up of utopians, socialists, and Marxist revolutionaries, including artists) was unhappy about Czar Nicholas II's rule. Caught between czarist governance, which ... log in or subscribe to read full text