Film montage — an editing technique that pieces together series of frames to form a continuous sequence – is used in popular films like Fight Club, The Karate Kid, The Godfather and Citizen Kane to name a few. The film editing technique that is used at several defining moments in films dates back to 1898.
On Monday, Google celebrated the 120th birth anniversary of Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein with a doodle. Eisenstein is known as the father of montage technique in filmmaking.
Eisenstein’s films had political themes and Google Doodle in its website added that “his films were also revolutionary in another sense, as he often depicted the struggle of downtrodden workers against the ruling class”.
Sergei, born in Latvia followed the footsteps of his father and took up architecture and engineering. He later joined the Red Army to serve the Bolshevik Revolution. During this time, he developed an interest in theater and started working as a designer in Moscow.
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In 1923, Eisenstein began his career as a theorist. His first full-length feature film, Strike released in 1925. Some of his other acclaimed works include Battleship Potemkin’, and ‘The General Line’. He felt that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene. According to him, the “collision” of shots could be used to manipulate the emotions of the audience and create film metaphors. He and his contemporary, Lev Kuleshov, argued that montage – the technique of editing a fast-paced sequence of short shots to transcend time or suggest thematic juxtapositions – was the essence of the cinema.
While his work was appreciated in the outside world, but Eisenstein’s structural issues in his films such as camera angles, crowd movements, and montage brought him under fire from the Soviet film community, forcing him to issue public articles of self-criticism.
His notable work, Battleship Potemkin, made on the Revolution of 1905 is widely known as one of the masterpieces in world cinema even today. The film among several other works of Sergei Eisenstein is often termed as the best understanding of the art of motion pictures.
In 1928, his film October, based on the 1917 October Revolution, irked the Soviet regime. The film was known for its use of imagery and realistic crowd sequences. Even though it was commissioned by the ruling regime, Eisenstein’s experiments with montage didn’t go down well with them. His other notable movies include Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible.
He died of a heart attack in 1948, shortly after he turned 50.
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