Thoughts on Soviet Editing Theory

Thoughts on Soviet Editing Theory

                When the Soviet Editing Theory comes to mind, so do four names; Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Vertov. The films Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) and Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929), also come to mind as well.  

                The Soviet Editing Theory heavily relies on how single images are juxtaposed together to create a montage.

                Going off of Eisenstein’s view of editing as “a montage is an idea that arises from the of independent shots,” his student Kuleshov, Kuleshov’s student Pudovkin, as well as Dziga Vertov, not one of Eisenstein’s students, all furthered Eisenstein’s idea of editing. From this group of people, Sergei Eisenstein, Vesvolod Pudovkin and Lev Kuleshov founded and taught at the Moscow Film School (c. 1919).

                Pudovkin believed editing was a mean of expression, which could be depicted by 5 different techniques: contrast, parallelism, symbolism, simultaneity, and leit motif. Pudovkin was taught by Lev Kuleshov, whose theory of editing was it meant more than just splicing film together to create a coherent story. Kuleshov believed that film should be juxtaposed in such a certain, powerful, way, that the montage evokes emotion from its audience.

                A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. So if you take multiple pictures and juxtapose them a certain way, you can evoke a certain emotion from people. They don’t even need those thousands of words per photo to describe their emotion. Their emotion is too powerful for words. The same goes for film. You can juxtapose a scene an array of ways to create a plethora of emotions. You can create it to make people feel sad. You can create it to make people feel angry. You can create it to make people feel happy. It is up to you, the editor, to create these emotions. Sometimes all you need are images to speak for you.

                Dziga Vertov, as well as his wife Elizaveta Vertov, was an editor. Vertov was known for his theory of the Kino-eye and documentary filmmaking. He was especially known for his film Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In this film it shows the daily life of people living in different cities in Russia. People are shown working, playing, getting married, getting divorced, being born and dying; just to name a few. Vertov develops and uses techniques such as fast and slow motion, jump cuts, freeze frames, double exposure and extreme close-ups. These are techniques that we still use today!