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Monday 12 October 2009

Narrative theories

Different Narrative theories

Lev Kuleshov
Lev Kuleshov discovered in the 1920s that meaning in film is determined more by the order of the shots than by what the shots contain. This realization is the requirement for montage effects. Kuleshov discovered the "Kuleshov Effect," or the manipulation of meaning through editing. The audience was manipulated into believing in the greatness of the performance by the creativity of the editing.
Film example; One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest This sequence shows how the editor can slowly and subtly move the viewer into the scene. Camera is cropped closer and closer to the characters between each take. The editor also knows exactly who to cut to at any time, choosing to cut to McMurphy only to allow the viewers to ‘breathe’ during the intense argument.

Vsevolod I. Pudovkin
Another filmmaker interested in montage, Pudovkin saw shots as building blocks in which narrative and meaning were built bit by bit. It is probably easiest to think of Pudovkin as closer in style to Hollywood filmmaking than Eisenstein in these respects: While Eisenstein strived most after an intellectual effect; Pudovkin was most interested in capturing an audience emotionally. Pudovkin's films had heroes, while the people were Eisenstein's main protagonist. Pudovkin's greatest film, Mother, contains characters who represent particular social positions: a son who favours the striking workers, a father on the opposite side. But the appeal of the film also resides in the very real and personal agonies of the title character.

Sergei Eisenstein

In opposition to Pudovkin, Eisenstein did not think of individual shots as building blocks, but rather as related through antagonism and difference (despite his calling their relation one of "attractions"). He saw the editing process as dialectical, like the logic underlying Marxism itself. Like other Russian formalist directors, he referred to this special attention to editing as "montage." Several of the best examples of Eisensteinian montage at work occur in Battleship Potemkin.
When sound came to film, Eisenstein theorized that the relationship between sound and image should also be dialectical. Sound was not simply a commentary on the images, like background music in American films, but brought its own set of meanings to the table.

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