Assimilating Eisenstein

The world of mainstream films is still dominated by classical continuity editing, not Russian dialectical montage.

However, the effects of Eisenstein reach far and wide and new film makers when they come to him can't help but be affected by his, still fresh and original cutting.

He continues to influence editors today.  And to take us right back to the start.  The Bourne Identity bears some passing relationship to the some of the action sequences in Battleship Potemkin, certainly for speed at least, as well as for conflict.

"In the late 1950s and early 1960s, films of the French New Wave introduced a more aggressive editing style than was typical of the Hollywood studios. À bout de souffle ( Breathless , 1960), directed by Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), used jump cuts that left out parts of the action to produce discontinuities between shots, and American directors a decade later assimilated this approach in pictures such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). As a result, by the 1970s the highly regulated point-of-view editing used in classical Hollywood began to break down as an industry standard, and the cutting style of American films became more eclectic, exhibiting a mixture of classical continuity and more abrupt, collage-like editing styles."


Source: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Editing-THE-DEVELOPMENT-OF-EDITING.html


Can you think of films you've watched that use aspects of Russian Montage?  Either very fast editing, or where the rules of classical continuity have been abandoned?  


You could argue Eisenstein, and his contemporary, Pudovkin went too far.  You could argue they sacrificed the attention of the audience in pursuit of the vision of film as art.

Certainly, some of the Russian films from this period are no easy watch.

Brave though.