Montage is a technique in film editing whereby a series of short shots are edited into a sequence to condense time, space, and information. The term montage was introduced to cinema primarily by Sergei Eisenstein, but other early Soviet directors such as Dziga Vertov helped shape the method into what it is today. Vertov and Eisenstein were two of post-revolutionary Russia’s most prominent filmmakers. Both men were devout Bolsheviks that each contributed to early cinema as an art form via unique revolutionary stylistic tools. And while they both realized the powerful potential of cinema and montage to educate and manipulate the masses, the two had very different views on how to construct their films.
Eisenstein saw montage as combining the narrative film with political conflict, such as in Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925), in order to place his viewers in the midst of the…show more content… Furthermore, the concept of “maximum realism” is essentially impossible to represent in cinema as “the presence of the camera changes reality being filmed,” for example the subject reacting to the presence of a camera (Perez, 2012). Vertov presented a new notion, however, where “life caught unawares” resolves the dilemma with this awareness of the camera being present. The Kinoks organization created a series of techniques used to deal with the presence of the camera as well. Some examples include the telephoto lens, disguising the cameraman (also called covert camera observation), and teaching subjects to ignore the camera. So although Vertov built his own exclusive principles to cinema as fact, he supported more experimental film, as he hated repetitive mainstream Hollywood cinema. Fictional films were clearly not practical to Vertov, who called them cine-nicotine, or “a drug that dulled the viewer’s awareness of social and political reality” (Perez,