Soviet Montage

In Moscow after the revolution, raw film was so scarce that Lev Kuleshov’s students rehearsed whole films with no film in the camera, curtains and frames standing in for the cuts.

His most famous lesson survives only in the telling: in Pudovkin’s version, one close-up of an actor’s still face was cut against a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin and a girl playing with a toy bear, and the audience praised the acting. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov and Dovzhenko built a decade of films on that lesson, that a shot means what the shot beside it makes it mean. Eisenstein’s October was due for the revolution’s tenth anniversary in November 1927, and only fragments were shown; by the time it opened in full in March 1928, Trotsky had fallen, and most of his scenes had been cut. The massacre on the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin, which Brian De Palma restaged with a baby carriage in The Untouchables sixty-two years later, did not happen as the film shows it.