Soviet montage cinema as propaganda and political rhetoric
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Date
2009Author
Russell, Michael
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Abstract
Most previous studies of Soviet montage cinema have concentrated on
its aesthetic and technical aspects; however, montage cinema was essentially
a rhetoric rather than an aesthetic of cinema. This thesis presents a comparative
study of the leading montage film-makers – Kuleshov, Pudovkin,
Eisenstein and Vertov – comparing and contrasting the differing methods
by which they used cinema to exert a rhetorical effect on the spectator for
the purposes of political propaganda.
The definitions of propaganda in general use in the study of Soviet
montage cinema are too narrowly restrictive and a more nuanced definition
is clearly needed. Furthermore, the role of the spectator in constituting the
rhetorical effectivity of a montage film has been neglected; a psychoanalytic
model of the way in which the filmic text can trigger a change in the
spectator’s psyche is required. Moreover, the ideology of the Soviet montage
films is generally assumed to exist only in their content, whereas in classical
cinema ideology also operates at the level of the enunciation of the filmic
text itself. The extent to which this is also true for Soviet montage cinema
should be investigated.
I have analysed the interaction between montage films and their spectators
from multiple perspectives, using several distinct but complementary
theoretical approaches, including recent theories of propaganda, a psychoanalytic
model of rhetoric, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theory of the
system of the suture, and Peircean semiotics. These different theoretical
approaches, while having distinct conceptual bases, work together to build
a new and consistent picture of montage cinema as a propaganda medium
and as a form of political rhetoric.
I have been able to classify the films of Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Pudovkin
as transactive, vertical agitation propaganda and the films of Vertov
as transactive, horizontal agitation propaganda. Furthermore, I show that
montage cinema embeds ideology in the enunciation of its filmic text, but
differs from classical cinema in trying to subvert the suturing process. I
conclude that Vertov at least partly created a non-representational cinematography
and that he could be regarded as being at least as much a
Suprematist film-maker as a Constructivist one.