Attractions as he defined them included “every aggressive moment … every element … that brings to light in the spectator those senses or that psychology that influence his experience – every element that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain emotional shots in a proper order within the totality …”. As shots related to each other dialectically, so the basic elements of a single shot – which he called its “attractions” – could interrelate to produce new meanings. Taking an idea from the literary Formalists, he conceived of the elements of a film being “decomposed” or “neutralised” so that they could serve as fresh material for dialectic montage.Įisenstein extended this concept of dialectics even to the shot itself. As a student, he had been fascinated by Oriental ideograms that combined elements of widely different meaning in order to create entirely new meanings, and he regarded the ideogram as a model of cinematic montage.

For Eisenstein, montage has as its aim the creation of ideas, of a new reality, rather than the support of narrative, the old reality of experience. He saw montage as the complex, pumping heart of film, but he also felt that its purpose was to support narrative rather than to alter it.Įisenstein set up his own theory of montage – as collision rather than linkage – in apposition to Pudovkin’s theory. But he identified five separate and distinct types of montage: contrast, parallelism, symbolism, simultaneity, and leitmotif. In this respect, his theory was simply Expressionist – that is, mainly concerned with how the filmmaker can affect the observer. For Pudovkin, montage was “the method which controls the ‘psychological guidance’ of the spectator”. In his two major works, Pudovkin developed from the basic root of the his experiments with Kuleshov a varied theory of cinema centered on what he called “relational editing”. Podovkin (a filmmaker, who is Kuleshov’s student), who later described the results of the experiment, audiences exclaimed at Moszhukin’s subtle and affective ability to convey such varied emotions: hunger, sadness and affection.

In the 1920s, a filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov took three identical shots of the well-known prerevolutionary actor Moszhukin and intercut them with shots of a plate of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a little girl.

Define montage of attractions