![]() This understanding, or class-consciousness, was seen as the antidote to capitalist ideology. ![]() Marx argued, however, that as capitalism developed and competition intensified between industry leaders, that workers would become so exploited that they would come to a realization of their own exploitation in that system. This prevented a logical movement from aristocracy to socialism and finally communism, where profit is distributed back to workers rather than centralized. The fact that such an undemocratic distribution of wealth was continued under capitalism was seen by Marx as the result of ideology – the values and beliefs that maintained the status quo. He saw capitalism as linked primarily to earlier aristocratic systems, which had exploited the labor of the majority for the profit of a social elite. For Marx, the key fact about any society was how it produced its livelihood and treated those who participated in that production. The October, 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the first successful revolution made in the name of Marxist social and economic theory. ![]() Most of you are probably familiar with the basic ideas and influence of Karl Marx, but I don’t like to assume this so I just want to clarify the historical context of Soviet filmmaking briefly. We’ve already looked at Colin MacCabe’s critique of cinematic realism, in which he asks, What does it do to the viewer when he/she is given a central, omniscient viewing position within the narrative space of a conventional film and discouraged from any kind of awareness of formal techniques or decisions.Ĭonversely, what the montage theorists asked was, What effect does it have when the viewer is dislocated in space and/or time by a cut that breaks continuity, or when they are jolted into awareness of film form by a cut between two very different, juxtaposed images? What film theorists have long been asking is, What does it do to the film viewer’s experience when the story seems to be “telling itself”? Are there ideological implications to the invisibility of authorial manipulation in classical Hollywood cinema? And Soviet avant-garde filmmakers were also interested in this, because by the 1920s these conventions were already well-established and being adopted by filmmakers around the world. The continuity system is about telling a story in such a way that it seems to be “telling itself.” By 1910, a group of Russian painters were trying to invent a new kind of art, one that utilized graphic collage to create a kind of shock for the viewer, and the creative use of juxtaposition was becoming widespread in European modernist art, theater and poetry.īut after the Soviet revolution, Soviet filmmakers developed a complex set of theories around the use of montage that was quite different from its use in Europe to depict confused, mental states or a rush of events.Īs we’ve seen, it’s generally agreed, whether you think it’s a good thing or not, that the continuity system is about formal invisibility so that, for example, the viewer isn’t aware of the cuts and doesn’t think about the way a film is edited at all. ![]() The roots of the montage aesthetic were in the modernist movements that had revolutionized the visual arts in Europe in the early 1900s. French and German avant-garde filmmakers used montage early in the 20th century, primarily to describe a character’s subjective “stream of consciousness” through rapid cutting. Montage describes cutting together images that aren’t in spatial or temporal continuity. Soviet Montage: editing and Marxist theory ![]()
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