Marxist+Theory

media type="custom" key="29386619" =Number 1: The formalist theory about how films can be made (and what they should do) using dialectic montage (putting different things/conflicting things together to make new meaning and show how the world really is.=
 * Background Slideshow**

Juxtaposing images by editing--is unique to film (and now video). During the 1920s, the pioneering Russian film directors and theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov demonstrated the technical, aesthetic, and ideological potentials of montage. The new media theorist Lev Manovich has pointed out how much these experiments of the 1920s underlie the aesthetics of contemporary video. Eisenstein believed that film montage could create ideas or have an impact beyond the individual images. Two or more images edited together create a "tertium quid" (third thing) that makes the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. This Hegelian dialectic is clearly displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage.

Eisensteins greatest demonstration of the power of montage comes in the "Odessa Steps" sequence of his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. On the simplest level, montage allows Eisenstein to manipulate the audiences perception of time by stretching out the crowds flight down the steps for seven minutes, several times longer than it would take in real time:The rapid progression and alternation of images gives a sensational event even greater visceral impact:

Number 2: Examining the “elements of film” from a particular text for dialectical oppositions to find meaning. Used now generally to identify any power relationships or structures within a moving image text. media type="youtube" key="2GrGjVVsW-k" width="560" height="315"

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