films started using different cuts/shots/montage to help tell a story in the 1930s.
when did films start using different cuts/shots/montage to help tell a story?
the 1930s
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bullet::::- intellectual – uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning. intellectual montage seeks to use few images, but images that are rich in cultural, symbolic, and political history. their collision brings about complex concepts that traditional montage could not achieve. it was at this time (1929) that eisenstein sought to distance filmmaking from an adherence to positivist realism. intellectual montage sought to present things not as they were, but as they functioned in society. in his examination of japanese and chinese language, eisenstein determined a linguistic link between language and montage. hieroglyphs endemic to either country's language were highly contextual. the combination of two characters created concepts, but when separated were neutral. the example eisenstein gives is the combination of the symbols 'eye' and 'water' produce the concept 'crying'. this logic was extended to japanese kabuki theater, which used a montage technique of acting, wherein parts of the body were moved in relation and collision to the whole and other parts of the body. film, similarly, could collide objects within the frame just as readily as it could between frames. intellectual montage seeks to capitalize on an internal frame as well as the composition and content of the image itself, without sacrificing a dialectical approach, which eisenstein ultimately concluded was the downfall of japanese cinema. intellectual montage was most notably used as a productive model in eisenstein's the general line (1929). here, dominants- shots and elements within the shot that mark the schema of all adjacent shots and elements- are not foregrounded, but delayed in an attempt to mimic musical resonance. resonances are secondary stimuli that help to highlight the dominant. it is here that one should note the understandable conflation of overtonal and intellectual montage. in fact, overtonal montage is a kind of intellectual montage, since both attempt to elicit complex ideas from the collision of cinematic stimulants.
soviet montage theory