George Eisenstein's Montage In Film

Eisenstein’s Montage in Strike

Eisenstein is a man blessed and cursed with an attention to detail. Soviet Cinema is in essence, montage, but how Eisenstein utilizes it to progress an intellectual conversation is much bespoke of montage and its capabilities. Unlike the manipulative montage of Kuleshov, or the relational editing sequence of Pudovkin, Eisenstein uses editing as a sequence of collisions that produce an associative meaning, despite different material (Eisenstein). However, for montage, all other factors are insignificant. What matters is the cut, and how the cut is related to other cuts. The following examples of the hieroglyphs are used by Eisenstein to illustrate a process of meaning generation which can be implemented in cinema

Eisenstein was radically more experimental than his contemporaries because in order to practice “intellectual montage”, one must be a practitioner of the avant-garde. Eisenstein’s theory of “collision montage” is that cinema never speaks through a single image, and the juxtaposition of several images act like words in a sentence, or parts of a character in Chinese or Japanese Calligraphy (Pg. 17, Eisenstein). Shots of foreign objects, or inserts, are not meant to contribute to a narrative but to deliver an idea intended by Eisenstein in the sequence. He also claims that montage films are faced “with the task of presenting not only a narrative that is logically connected but one that contains a maximum of emotion and stimulating power.” (Pg. 4, Eisenstein). A scene to illustrate this from Strike would be at the ending of the film where the putting down of the strike by the army is intercut with the footage of a cattle being slaughtered. 
 33. The soldiers’ feet walk away from the camera (seen at a further distance)
 34. The bull’s skin is stripped off. 
 35. 1,500 bodies at the foot of the cliff.
 36. Two skinned bulls’ heads. 
 37. A hand lying in a pool of blood.
The bull doesn’t exist in the narrative but it is used to exemplify killing of the laborers at the hands of the army. Perhaps the scene is Eisenstein

Eisenstein took the idea of montage as cinematic language, and essentially went to town with it. And because of this, Eisenstein really pushed the depths of cinema and forced us as the viewer to do the cinematic version of “reading between the