Sergei Eisenstein

A pram rolls down the Odessa Steps while soldiers advance in formation, and the sequence in Battleship Potemkin is assembled from fragments that do not join in real space. Collision between shots is the whole theory. Strike cuts from workers being put down to cattle being slaughtered and expects the viewer to complete the thought. The crowd is the protagonist, and individuals appear mainly as faces held for a beat.

Signature

• Montage as argument: meaning made between shots, not inside them.
• The mass as protagonist, individuals reduced to typed faces.
• Graphic collision, rhythmic cutting, extreme close-ups of objects.
• Historical events restaged as spectacle.