Key Terms: 

• Propaganda 
• Creative geography 
• Constructed reality (fiction or nonfiction) (Bazin)
• Socialist realism 
• Continuity principle
• Classic film: ELS, LS MS, CU etc 
• Verisimilitude
• Collision principle – two shots put together creates a whole new meaning 

 

Key Thinkers: 

• Kuleshov (Kuleshov effect)
• Sergi Eisenstein e.g. Battleship Potemkin – collision 
• Dziga Vertov
• Pudhovkin – continuity principle 
• Bazin (“Rome, open city”, Rosselini, 1945 – Italian Neo-realism) – realism 
• Kracauer 

 

Realist Techniques and Concepts: 

• Deep Focus
• Free/moving eye
• Static camera
• Extended shot duration 
• Eye level 
• Wide Shot 

 

Middle between the two is classicism

 

Formalist Techniques and Concepts: 

• Non-diegetic music 
• Sets 
• Editing
• Camera angles
• Heightened lighting
• Split screen
• Space/time manipulation  

 

 

Classic Film Form: 

• Creative geography 
• Soviet Montage – cuts should be visual – collision principle/discontinuity 
• Combination of realist and formalist (classicism)

 

How Editing Makes Meaning: 

• Kuleshov effect 
• Soviet montage 
• Order, duration, repetition and rhythm

 

How Mise-en-Scene Makes Meaning: 

• Form – montage?
• Content – setting, lighting, universal focus, performance, composition etc. 

 

Communist Concepts Manifest in Soviet Montage: 

• Centralised production 
• Film contributing to the revolution and propaganda e.g. workers rights 
• Film maker as the engineer 
• Film industry part of the state control of industry 
• Narkompros – one state owned film studio 

 

5 Types of Soviet Montage: 

• Intellectual Montage:  the cutting outs together concepts constructing ideas through edit 
• Tonal Montage: feelings
• Metric Montage: cuts happen irrelevant of content but according to time 
• Rhythmic Montage: cut to music 
• Over Tonal Montage: mis of tonal, metric, and rhythmic montage  

 

What Were Bazin’s Two Main Problems With Expressive/Formalist Cinema?

• Realism is more important, pure, authentic 

 

How and Why did the Soviets Become Experts and Pioneers in Film Editing?

• Studied filmmaking and first film school 
• Initially didn’t have and film stock (no factories, trouble importing) looked at old films and chopped it up 

 

Why Might Formalist Techniques and Ideas Keep Evolving in the Future in a Way that Realist Ones Might Not?

• You can’t evolve reality unless society does too but you can evolve imagination