A Brief History of Film

Part Five:  Splicing, Dicing, and the Birth of Montage Editing

by Fr. John Wykes, OMV

Not long ago I was having a conversation with a young filmmaker.  My friend was anxiously trying to make a distinction between how Baby Boomers and Gen Z’ers edit.   He was trying to make the point that editing in the 21st Century is at a much faster pace than it was in the past.  So I showed him a clip from a 100-year-old film.  As he watched the rapid-fire editing montage, his mouth dropped open and he said, “Wow”.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

As I have told my film students many times before, it is the content and not the year that determines the pace of editing.  Some will start with the technique and work backwards to the content – for example, saying “I want to make a really cool fast-paced video” and then trying to figure out what content to force into their pre-conceived editing schema.  The better way is to decide on the content first and then let the content determine the pace of the editing.

That said, some of the fastest editing from the 20th Century can be found in the silent era – a time when the visual image danced free from the constrictive grip of synchronous sound.

The filmmaker often credited with discovering the true power of montage editing is Sergei Eisenstein.  Hardly a Gen-Z’er, Eisenstein was born back in 1898 and boasted a head of hair that looked as jarring as his editing.  A product of his time, this Latvian filmmaker and theorist made movies filled to the brim with Soviet propaganda.  His images, if you can stomach the Soviet-style preachiness, are as powerful today as they were over one hundred years ago.

Eisenstein discovered the power of editing when he realized that two shots, each with very different content, could create a whole new meaning when spliced together.  This can be summarized by the formula:

Shot A + Shot B = Meaning C

…in which the juxtaposition of Shots A and B create a new meaning (C) that cannot be found in Shot A alone or Shot B alone.

Take, for example, the opening post-title shots of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936).  A shot of a flock of sheep going past the camera (Shot A) slowly dissolves into a shot of workers walking from a subway station on their way to work (Shot B).  The meaning we find in this juxtaposition, which is not found in either Shot A alone or Shot B alone, is that workers in our modern world have been dehumanized; they are nothing more than mindless sheep at the service of modern machines.  Of course, Charlie gets drawn into the gears of a machine later on in the film – he is, in a sense, “devoured” by modern technology.

Lev Kuleshov made a famous film in which the shot of an actor was juxtaposed with a bowl of hot soup, a dead child lying in state, and a scantily-clad female.  The shot of the actor was identical each time but the actor’s performance appeared to depict hunger, sadness, or lust, depending on the shot with which it was combined.

Eisenstein took this concept of shot juxtaposition and pushed it to the limit, experimenting with ever more rapid editing and shots lasting a fraction of a second. 

His best-known work, Battleship Potemkin (1925) features two memorable sequences.  One – the plate-smashing sequence shows the growing frustration of a sailor who has had enough of hunger and smashes a plate in a flurry of brief shots (I counted ten shots in four seconds).  Two – the Odessa Steps sequence shows the slaughter of innocent people by Cossacks marching down on them with guns and bayonets.  Easily the best-known scene in silent cinema, the Odessa Steps sequence has been referenced countless numbers of times in other films – most famously in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), which even goes so far as to show a baby carriage tumbling down the stairs, just as in Eisenstein’s film.

Convinced of the power of montage editing but taking a more documentary approach, filmmaker Dziga Vertov turned his camera to real people and events to create his Man with a Movie Camera (1929).  In this amazing film, Vertov uses dutch angles, split screen, slow motion, fast motion, and a dizzying array of other techniques to capture real people in real life circumstances.  Firefighters racing to a fire are real firefighters.  Athletes running in a race are real athletes.  Telephone operators busily flipping switches and connecting cables are real telephone operators.  Vertov takes these bits of reality and cuts between them with amazing dexterity – sometimes the pace of editing is so fast as to be almost hypnotic.

What made all this possible one hundred years ago was that these films were silent.  Perhaps we should be more specific, because silent films were never truly silent – there was always music (and even some sound effects) that accompanied each film.  What was technically impossible at the time was synchronous sound – for example, dialogue that matched the lip movements of the performers on screen.

In his early years, Eisenstein saw a lack of synchronous sound not as a negative, but as a strong positive.  No synchronous sound meant that the visual image was released from bondage.  It did not have to slavishly link itself to sound as in a theater production.  Instead the visual image, accompanied only by music, could be cut, cross cut, dissolved, sliced and diced, even down to a fraction of a second, with a freedom that was impossible in most other art forms.

With the passage of time, the coming of sound films was inevitable.  Cameras became heavy – monstrosities that were blimped so the loud motors would not interfere with on-set sound recording.  The radical editing of Soviet montage gave way to a more bland and realistic pace which allowed lengthy exchanges of dialogue to take place.  The inventiveness of silent cinema gave way, at least for a time, to a more programmatic approach.  Not until Alfred Hitchcock lensed his famous shower sequence in Psycho (1960) did cinema regain the radical inventiveness it had lost with the end of the silent era.

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