Modernism in cinema and the soviet montage

‘Thus one can really speak of two ‘modern’ cinemas, a silent cinema of Murnau, Dreyer, Lang, Bunuel, and Eisenstein and a sound cinema which crystallizes in the 1960s and early 1970s.’ (Orr, 1993, P.2.)

Modernism in film is hard to determine, as a new movement in cinema has not really come about to change this classical system we have come to know so well, and we are still living through it. Even postmodernism can be seen to be just a rebellion against this system. As Orr suggests, this art form is hardly even 100 years old (Orr, 1993.), and art movements don’t always change this quickly. So for me I class the early period of modern cinema as the real modernist cinema, as it was what pioneered how we see film today. I studied early silent cinema last semester and already have quite a good understanding of the history: like how the industrial revolution was happening at the same time, and that really cinema and the film camera was a product of this (just as modernist art was a reaction to this industrialisation). Filmmakers like the Lumiere brothers and Eisenstein were pioneers in capturing this modernisation, yet I think that soviet montage in particular stands out the most in this ‘modern cinema’. Directors like Dziga Vertov and his film Man with a movie camera (1929) rebelled against the classical cinema system that was arising and instead were working against such bourgeois (high society) conventions. As Long and Wall suggest they wanted to shatter the ‘illusions’ and ‘ideologies’ of the dominating mainstream of Hollywood. They merged images and ideas together, with their montage style editing, to create a new reality (Long and Wall, 2009.)

References:

Long, P. and Wall, T. (2009.) ‘Modernism, Postmodernism and After’ in Media Studies: Texts, Production and Context. Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Man With a Movie Camera (1929.) Directed by Dziga Vertov [Film.] Soviet Union: VUFKU

Orr, J. (1993.) Cinema and Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.