Meaning and emotional shock arise from the collision of separate images, so that two shots joined produce an idea contained in neither.
Eisenstein set out the idea in a 1923 essay in the journal LEF, first for theatre and then for film, describing attractions as aggressive moments that work on the spectator directly. His later films put it into practice: in Strike (1925) the shooting of workers is intercut with the slaughter of a bull, and in October (1928) shots of religious idols are cut in sequence to argue against the idea of God.
In practice
- An advertisement cuts from a commuter's grey face to a sunlit beach, and the viewer supplies the argument about escape.
- A protest documentary intercuts a minister's speech about calm with footage of riot police, and the contradiction makes the case.
- Possible explanations
- Eisenstein's account is that the spectator does the work: shown two images in conflict, the mind synthesises a third meaning, as in a Japanese ideogram where two pictorial signs combine into a concept. The editor's job is to engineer the collisions.
- In its favour
- It shaped Soviet cinema of the 1920s and, through it, advertising, music video and political film, where meaning built from juxtaposition is routine. The Kuleshov Effect and later research on context in perception give it some empirical footing.
- Against it
- André Bazin and other realist critics argued that montage imposes the director's meaning and that the long take respects both the world and the viewer's freedom to interpret it. Historians also note that audiences often missed Eisenstein's intellectual metaphors, which suggests the synthesis is less automatic than he claimed.
- Standing
- Builds on the Kuleshov Effect and differs from Kuleshov's emphasis on linkage. Bazin's realist reply is the standing counter-position.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience