Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and the School of Soviet Montage

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination. The montage experiments carried out by Kuleshov in the late 1910s and early 1920s formed the theoretical basis of Soviet montage cinema, culminating in the work of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov, among others, several of whose early works will be duly excerpted and juxtaposed to observe the results of Kuleshov’s theories.