Fiction Adaptation - Montage Editing Workshop

Seeing as i had not attended the Soviet montage workshop, i decided to do a bit of my own research on the topic. I found vast amounts of examples and reading tools on it and so i soaked up a lot. I did try an utilise what i had read an incorporate some of the editing styles into my work. 

I knew briefly what it was about as we had discussed the editing style last year theoretically with Louis Heaton. I love learning about new theories and styles, especially ones that have such a revolutionary impact in film, as this kind of editing definitely did and it changed many aspects of it. 

Soviet montage began roughly around 1917, amidst the Russian uprising against TSAR, the current ruling oppressive power force in Russia at the time (This was also whilst Russia was in complete disarray due to being heavily involved in WW1). 
The moscow film school - found 1919.
Films primary function, to make films in support of the Bolshevik political party, making news reels for propaganda purposes.

This brought about the Kuleshov effect, he began his own workshop, 'The Kuleshov Workshop'. Lenin loved the film 'Tolerance' (1916) an screened it all across Russia, the film was dissected heavily by Kuleshov an his co-workers, and started to reassemble the shots in different ways, to see what effect they had. 

This brought about the Kuleshov Effect - 
' The meaning of film was not only in spatial composition, but in the arrangement of shots.'
He termed the phrase 'Creative geography' meaning film can transcend space and time.

 Then came about Sergei Einstein, he developed Soviet montage through theory. Breaking confines of space and time to make film a unique language in itself. His debut film, Battleship Pometkin, was a huge success due to its editing and themes. He believed montage acted in the same way as a Marxist dialectic which is history being a perpetual context.                                             Synthesis  
                                                Thesis ->     <- Anti-thesis     
                                                     PROPAGANDA

The 5 methods of Montage editing - 

Metric Montage - 
Cutting based purely on the length of the shot. cutting to the beat.

Rhythmic Montage - 
Concerning rhythm of action in the shot, similar to metric, cutting in tempo with the action in the shot.

Tonal Montage - 
No concerned with time, but the tone of the shot. Lighting, shadows, shapes of frame. Cutting inbetween different aesthetics give tones of Marxist dialectic.

Over tonal Montage - 
Combines metric, rhythmic and tonal, an how they play against each other.

The last one, Einstein's favourite
Intellectual or Ideological Montage - 
Where as the previous methods focused on inducing emotional  focused responses, this montage felt to express abstract ideas by creating relationships between opposing visual intellectual concepts.