soviet montage

On 27 August 1919 Lenin nationalised the Russian film industry and handed it to the People's Commissariat of Education, and the world's first state film school opened in Moscow that year with Lev Kuleshov teaching in it. Kuleshov had already coined the word "montage" in a 1916 essay, and at the school he tested the claim directly: cutting an actor's blank face against a bowl of soup, a baby in a coffin and a woman on a sofa, and finding audiences read a different feeling into the identical shot each time. Eisenstein pushed the idea further, writing that meaning is "an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots." Strike runs the collision on the state's own material: a factory walkout escalates from workers trading demands to informers, hunger and the army arriving, cut so cause and effect land as a single argument. Battleship Potemkin does the same thing at larger scale, cutting a naval mutiny against the public demonstration it draws and the police massacre that answers it, so the support explains the killing before anyone says so. Vertov turned the same tool on the tool itself: Man with a Movie Camera cuts a day in Soviet life against the filming of that day and an audience watching the result.

Distinguish from German Expressionism is the parallel 1920s revolution but operates through mise-en-scène (what's in front of the camera) rather than montage (how shots are assembled). Avant-Garde Cinema is the broader experimental tradition that Soviet Montage partially belongs to but which extends far beyond political cinema.