EISENSTEIN AND MONTAGE EDITING (MULTIPLE ELEMENTS)

The Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein said of his theory of intellectual montage editing is "“an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another”.  I strongly believe in this idea that the collision of two images for instance a shot of a blank face followed by a shot or rain at a window combine and collide to create a meaning of sadness and tears. However I want to see if this can be taken a little further by one image not replacing the next consecutively in a montage but explore the possibilities of them working concurrently to create meaning.

Split screen techniques will allow this and several images can be happening at the same time creating a multi layered message or ideology. Also double exposure techniques rather than split screen and layers happening one over the other or incorporated inside one another. The interesting thing about the double exposure technique used above is that it is not creating this as Eisenstein intended by shots following one another BUT at the same time. This will indeed create the whilst not a "collision of images" a blurring of images, messages and ideology that run concurrently rather than consecutively.

This is certainly something I wish to pursue so not the "collision" of images perhaps more like the "collusion" of images working together at the same time.

The following article greatly helped whilst doing more in-depth research of Eisenstein and in clarifying my own thoughts on applying his

Eisenstein: ‘Intellectual Montage’, Poststructuralism, and Ideology Ideas on Montage by Jason Lindop Volume 11, Issue 2 / February 2007 13 minutes (3231 words)

The great Soviet theorist and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein explores the idea of creating an ‘intellectual cinema’ in three essays which were composed in 1929: Beyond the Shot, The Dramaturgy of Film Form, and The Fourth Dimension in Cinema. A central concern in these works is how a series of images can, when correctly composed by the filmmaker and then interpreted by the viewer, produce an abstract concept not strictly present in each of the composite images. He seeks to explicate this process by applying to cinema the dynamics he found in the Japanese hieroglyph. The following examples of the hieroglyphs are used by Eisenstein to illustrate a process of meaning generation which can be adopted by the cinema, in the service of ‘intellectual montage’.

eye + water = crying
door + ear = eavesdropping
child + mouth = screaming
mouth + dog = barking
mouth + bird = singing
 knife + heart = anxiety

In response to the idea of the ideogram, Eisenstein concluded that montage is “an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another”. This description seems to reverse the order in which the process actually unfolds in the spectator’s mind; it is not so much that the additive effect of two separate terms produce a new concept so much as the a priori conventionally determined meaning gives special connotations to the terms which, taken as an aggregate, produce this meaning. For example, if we take the three terms above that involve the word mouth, without knowledge of the conventionally based meanings, it would just as reasonable to conclude that the resulting meaning was hunger. Assuming the production of a sound is the natural meaning that results from these terms can only arise once we know the conventional rules of combination, which constitute not only a kind of grammatical code but also an ideological privileging of one value over another. For example, if we were shown the first two hieroglyphs involving the term mouth, and were then asked about the meaning of mouth + bird, we would then be in a position to conclude singing, because the previous usage of the noun/sign ‘mouth’ functioned as the verb ‘to make the appropriate sound’ of the animal with which it was combined. This conclusion would be logical in a true sense of the term, and is the kind of inference Eisenstein seems to apply to all above examples independent of each other. On an ideological level, this grammatical rule of composition forms a binary opposition that places production (of sound) over consumption (of food). Eisenstein presents the process as one of logical induction of the final term when it is more accurately described as one of ideological deduction of the composite terms. As an interesting aside, from the perspective of Marxist/Communist ideological needs, the privileging of production over consumption would serve to direct the workers attention in the right direction by valuing contribution to the system over thoughts of what the system can give back.