In this week’s reading, I was pleasantly surprised to find a mention of a Soviet documentary Battleship Potemkin (1925). In Russian schools we study and analyse this film from a historical point of view, and it was very interesting to learn about it from a point of view of a filmmaker.

I particularly enjoyed Einstein’s take on evoking viewers’s feeling by creating conflict and clashing incompatible rather than giving them a set of coherent and consonant videos. I never really though about it before, but I would have thought that its the shots that work well together that create a stronger impact.

He argued that editing should not create continuity, but rather conflict— conflict of light, mood, rhythm, graphical properties, and ideas. Meaning in cinema did not come from the individual shots, but rather through ideas spawned by their collision. Each edit should clash formal properties and cultural ideas against one another, provoking audiences to make new associations about society and its structures.

F. Broderick 2010

This new intake works especially well with my previous knowledge of Soviet ideology and way of life. The ruling Party controlled people’s minds by constantly evoking strong emotions and emphasising contrast between glorious Soviet Union and “others”. In Soviet Union you are not indifferent, you LOVE the Party, you HATE bourgeois, you DESPISE capitalism, etc. The society worked because people believed and love their ideology with all their heart, and react to any other opinion with passionate hatred (and because everyone who disagrees was sent to Gulag but that’s a different story). No surprise that the documentaries of that time adopted the same principle.

And by the way, the red flag in this documentary is the first time a colour occurred in Russian cinematography. It was hand painted on each of 108 frames it appeared in, which made the already strong impression even  stronger.

I am really excited about trying this technique of conflict in my own works. For this second assignment I will be doing a montage (99.99% sure) and I think that this technique will work especially well with this approach. When there is no voice over or a “guide” to talk you through the experience, the more powerful a video sequence is, the better. I am also interested to see how it will work out for a video without a political agenda and no intention of propaganda. I guess, we will see!

P.S. Oh my God! I just realize that I already subconsciously knew the strong effect of this technique before! In my previous post on “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten“, I already talked about clashing two different ideas together, without even realizing it!

I really enjoyed how the director managed to combine the feeling of warmth, happiness and music-filled freedom of pre-civil war Cambodia with cold silence and painful destruction of Khmer Rouge dictatorship. The constant contrast between colourful shots of smiling and singing people and gruesome shots of war enhance the experience and invoke empathy in a viewer.

This is amazing. I love those moments when you re-discover something you knew deep down already, but didn’t really think of. Yes!!!

References:

F. Broderick (2010). Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice. Taylor and Francis.