Eisenstein pushed the grammar of film editing to its limits with his films and his style and what he learnt about what an audience understand is definately something that a lot of editors, and hopefully you, will learn from.
A typical American film at the time would have had around 300 cuts, an Eisenstein film had around 1000.
Here is his contribution put very nicely:
"Eisenstein believed that editing was the foundation of film art. For Eisenstein, meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationships among shots established by editing. Translating a Marxist political perspective into the language of cinema, Eisenstein referred to his editing as "dialectical montage" because it aimed to expose the essential contradictions of existence and the political order. Because conflict was essential to the political praxis of Marxism, the idea of conflict furnished the logic of Eisenstein's shot changes, which gives his silent films a rough, jagged quality. His shots do not combine smoothly, as in the continuity editing of D. W. Griffith and Hollywood cinema, but clash and bang together. Thus, his montages were eminently suited to depictions of violence, as in Strike , Potemkin , and Ten Days . In his essays Eisenstein enumerated the numerous types of conflict that he found essential to cinema. These included conflicts among graphic elements in a composition and between shots, and conflict of time and space created in the editing process and by filming with different camera speeds.":
Source: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Editing-THE-DEVELOPMENT-OF-EDITING.html
So, as I said earlier, you can't really seperate easily Eisenstein from the political background he came from. I wonder does you're political background effect your film making? Does mine?
We really don't do very many stories that you could say - that's Northern Irish. Maybe that's a challenge for us. What would you say about things here?
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