DIALECTICAL MONTAGE – NONLINEAR VIDEO EXPERIMENTS
Working from an initial case study that examined an example of online video practice called #6SecondScare, an online video competition launched by Eli Roth and his digital horror network The Crypt through Vine, short-form video sharing service. Our group has developed an interest in nonlinear/montage video and thus plans to explore dialectical montage, more specifically, The Kuleshov Effect. Our objective is to examine how Kuleshov’s experiment is affected when it is processed through Vine. How does Vine’s constrictive nature affect the construction of Kuleshov’s montage experiment, and how does this affect how it is portrayed to an audience?
Short and micro online videos have recently emerged as a new form of user-generated content on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Vine. Vine allows users record and edit five to six-second-long looping video clips to post online, re-vine, and share others’ posts with Vine followers. The videos can be published through Vine’s social network as well as on other popular services such as Facebook and Twitter. Vine’s app can also be used to browse through videos posted by other users, along with groups of videos by theme, trending, or popularity. The Vine platform, in particular, has become affiliated with the notion of creativity, as its 6-second time constraint was intended to inspire user creativity by allowing digital videos to take on entirely new forms. Vine has an innately fragmented, non-linear, montage-like construction.
Montage is the notion that a filmmaker can create a new dynamic hole, by putting two or more distinctive shot together. It operates on the principle that each shot illuminates the other. Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov believed these shots had to fall into a particular chronological order. Whereas Russian filmmaker and film theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, understood montage as a cellular structure: osmosis between the shots cause a transcendent idea to emerge. Eisenstein’s more sophisticated approach to montage catalysed greater complexities in nonlinear editing, though Kuleshov’s dialectical editing was the impetus for his developments. Dialectical Montage, according to Sergei Eisenstein, is the juxtaposition of two shots, as well as the progressive alternation, and consequent conflict, of images as a vehicle for abstract concepts to be understood by inference–the third unnamed quality when you jam two unrelated texts together. Kuleshov demonstration of dialectical montage became what is known as the Kuleshov Effect. He alternated a single shot of a mostly expressionless actor with shots of a bowl of soup, a baby in a coffin, and a sensual woman. Audiences were moved by the actor’s profound “responses” to each of these, though the actor maintained the same expression throughout the film. Alfred Hitchcock used Kuleshov’s technique to create one of the most celebrated murders in film history: a close-up of a woman in a shower screaming, her belly, a knife that never touches her, and blood running down a drain. This is a shining example of how people are hard-wired to make connections, draw conclusions, “fill blanks” and create meaning out of what they see.
Just as Kuleshov and Eisenstein introduced montage to a germinal medium, illuminating the importance of editing in cinema. “Vinemakers” are exploring a similarly new medium, digital video, that will catalyse new techniques and styles in video creation. Vine is challenging the basics of story form and structure through the creation of digital micro-stories.
The aim of our sketches is to explore the theoretical foundations of montage video, closely examined by Sergei Eisenstein, and demonstrated by Lev Kuleshov (the Kuleshov Effect), by deconstructing Kuleshov’s original montage experiment in Vine. We hope that by processing Kuleshov’s video through Vine we will gain greater insight into the defining components of montage video production and, more importantly, the processes and affordances of nonlinear/montage video creation using Vine.
