The Fall of the Romanovs (USSR, 1927) Esfir Shub
*Juxtaposing newsreels with home movies*
Esfir Shub applies what Sergei Eisenstein calls ‘intellectual montage’ to newsreels and home movies. Intellectual montage is based on the idea of creating meaning out of the ‘collision’ of film shots: “two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition” (Eisenstein in Jay Leyda (ed.), Film Sense, Faber and Faber, London, 1986 (1943), p.14) This stands opposite the idea that montage connects shots of film to create continuity, as for instance the classical Hollywood system does.
By the mid 1920s Shub is a skilled editor and experiments with diverse found footage material. As an editor, she sees opportunities for the use of existing film material to tell the story of the 1917 revolution ten years after the event. Very little film material on the actual revolutionairy events is available but Shub finds ways to use what was then considered ‘counter-revolutionairy’ film like home movies of Tsar Nikolai II. Combining this material with old footage from newsreels, she makes The Fall of the Romanovs (1927). Her story of the revolution creates meaning that is contrary to the originally intended meaning of the footage. A technique she develops in this film is the juxtaposition of images to give them a new, often opposing meaning. She follows Eisensteins idea of intellectual montage and expands it to creating inversed meanings out of the collision of shots from newsreels and home movies.
This description of a scene from the film is a good example of this technique:
A crowd of elegant idlers are dancing [a mazurka on the awninged deck of a yacht].
The dancing tires some of them. They drink wine.
Title: ‘It made me sweat.’
And again they dance.
Title: ‘...sweat.’
A peasant, exhausted by his work, ploughs a furrow...
(Weisfeld quoted in Leyda, Films Beget Films, Allen & Unwin, London, 1964, p. 28).
Juxtapositions like this might seem simple and straightforward today, but as Leyda says, “it took [Shub] imagination to dig them from her raw material” (Leyda, 1964, p. 27). Our familiarity today with these kind of oppositions in editing shows how well accepted this technique, which was invented for propaganda, has become in features, documentaries and commercials.
I did not find a copy of this film on tape or DVD.
The Fall of the Romanovs (USSR, 1927) Esfir Shub
*Juxtaposing newsreels with home movies*
Esfir Shub applies what Sergei Eisenstein calls ‘intellectual montage’ to newsreels and home movies. Intellectual montage is based on the idea of creating meaning out of the ‘collision’ of film shots: “two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition” (Eisenstein in Jay Leyda (ed.), Film Sense, Faber and Faber, London, 1986 (1943), p.14) This stands opposite the idea that montage connects shots of film to create continuity, as for instance the classical Hollywood system does.
By the mid 1920s Shub is a skilled editor and experiments with diverse found footage material. As an editor, she sees opportunities for the use of existing film material to tell the story of the 1917 revolution ten years after the event. Very little film material on the actual revolutionairy events is available but Shub finds ways to use what was then considered ‘counter-revolutionairy’ film like home movies of Tsar Nikolai II. Combining this material with old footage from newsreels, she makes The Fall of the Romanovs (1927). Her story of the revolution creates meaning that is contrary to the originally intended meaning of the footage. A technique she develops in this film is the juxtaposition of images to give them a new, often opposing meaning. She follows Eisensteins idea of intellectual montage and expands it to creating inversed meanings out of the collision of shots from newsreels and home movies.
This description of a scene from the film is a good example of this technique:
A crowd of elegant idlers are dancing [a mazurka on the awninged deck of a yacht].
The dancing tires some of them. They drink wine.
Title: ‘It made me sweat.’
And again they dance.
Title: ‘...sweat.’
A peasant, exhausted by his work, ploughs a furrow...
(Weisfeld quoted in Leyda, Films Beget Films, Allen & Unwin, London, 1964, p. 28).
Juxtapositions like this might seem simple and straightforward today, but as Leyda says, “it took [Shub] imagination to dig them from her raw material” (Leyda, 1964, p. 27). Our familiarity today with these kind of oppositions in editing shows how well accepted this technique, which was invented for propaganda, has become in features, documentaries and commercials.
I did not find a copy of this film on tape or DVD.