Montage in the USSR and Its Fifteen Fundamental Procedures According to Semyon Timoshenko - Text 2
By way of introducing his topic, Timoshenko makes a distinction between the invention of the kinematograph and the birth of film (kino) art, which happened “sometime between 1907 and 1915,”[5] thanks to the conscious use of montage, he tells us. This distinction foreshadows what will be at the heart of this volume with an openly pedagogical aim: introducing “fifteen fundamental montage procedures.”[6]
Timoshenko established these fifteen procedures based on examples taken from important films – both Soviet and foreign, and pertaining both to the avant-garde and to commercial cinema – in addition to quotations from Balázs, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Eisenstein and analyses by Alexandre Belenson, one of the first Russian authors, with Kuleshov, to write about montage. His references show that he closely followed thinking about cinema as it was developing in the Soviet Union at the time, and that his ambition was to provide a synthetic approach with practical aims. His description of the various procedures enabled him at the same time to comment on his own shooting scripts for films not made and on the problems he saw in his colleagues’ films, while taking advantage of the opportunity to rhapsodise from time to time about the virtuosity of directors such as Griffith, Eisenstein and Vertov.