Lev Kuleshov:
Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov was a Russian and Soviet filmmaker and film theorist. The Russians adored editing. This was partly because, in the years after 1917 when the Soviet Union was encouraging a potentially great film industry, film makers didn't have enough resources i.e cameras or film stock to shoot anything. Instead they experimented in the cutting room with found footage, from pre-revolutionary Russian melodramas and rare Hollywood imports. A crucial moment was the smuggling into Russia of a print of 'DW Griffiths's Intolerance' (1916), the most beautifully edited early Hollywood film. Under influence of Lev, trained actors and directors at the Kuleshov Workshop, (a study group outside school) which had been formed in 1920 as a communist mouthpiece. The students who attended the workshop re-ran the film 'Intolerance' constantly, then re-edited it themselves, discovering the radical effects produced when they changed a sequence. The film depicted an actor with shots of three different subjects: a hot plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a pretty woman lying in a couch. The expressionless gaze of the actor (which remained the same throughout) was displayed adjacent to one of these subjects at a time in a kind of diptych (compressed story) format. Although the actor remained with the same expression, audiences praised Ivan Mozzhukhin's (the actor) range - showing hunger when he saw the soup, joy in seeing his daughter play and grief for his mother. The film had clear psychological effects on the audience who actively made connections between the emotional connotations associated with the images, and how they perceived the actor to be feeling i.e they projected their own feelings about the subjects onto the physical reaction of the actor. This sequencing technique is known as 'montage' - the French word for 'assemble'. Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding film and cinema that heavily relies on editing. It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema and brought formalism (a theory of film study that id focused on the formal or technical elements such as; lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of colour, shot composition, and editing). Sergei Eisenstein ‘The strength of montage lies in the fact that it involves the spectator’s emotions and reason. The spectator is forced to follow the same creative path that the authors followed when creating the image.’ - Eisenstein. |
Kuleshov was among the first Soviet filmmakers to dissect the effects of juxtaposition. Through his experiments and research he discovered that depending on how shots are assembled the audience will attach a specific meaning or emotion to it. He formulated a hypothesis; the dramatic effect of a film was found not in the content of the shots, but in the edits that join them together. This became known as the 'Kuleshov Effect'. His innovative and newly cut version of the Hollywood film 'Intolerance' became one of the most influential films in Russian history. The film transcended through time and space studying the contrast between how standard Hollywood 'continuity editing' creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity or 'jump cut' editing might become more disconcerting or volatile.
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In this powerpoint presentation, I have arranged the images in pairs which have connections of a similar nature between them. This presentation is not a final version of the order, or necessarily the number of photos, or even the final featuring photographs.
I have chosen the cover photo, mainly because it's square and I've decided that my final photobook will be square. Therefore, I find this image rather fitting. Another reason for choosing this image is because there is space for the book title in the space next to the green pipe. All the images will be displayed in pairs (or fours), and will each be either both landscape or both portrait. The pairings of images on the powerpoint pages which have both a portrait and a landscape image on, will be displayed on separate juxtaposing pages. The reason for this is that it makes me uncomfortable to have 2 images of different formats displayed on the same page, e.g page 14 & 8. I am considering getting rid of the pages with question marks on (e.g page 2, 22 & 24) because I feel their relationship is far too obvious, and also on page 22 (the image of the wall pots) there is only 3 images, a triptych, which I feel just doesn't work. |
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