Word: eisenstein
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps because they grew up together, they have certain styles and techniques in common. Cinematic techniques like montage, the dissolve of one scene into another, appeared in the comics well before they were seen on the screen or perfected by Eisenstein. At the same time, the movies were ahead of the comics in developing the continuing adventure serial. Any influence that one form may have had on the other should not be exaggerated. Some directors insist, however, that there was a certain amount of give and take. "There was a connection between Happy Hooligan and Chaplin," says Italian
...make a montage ... means to write something cinegraphic with recorded shots."). Appearances serve as linguistic elements, his "writing" vocabulary, which means less concern with the purity of the images (i. e. dialectical compositions) than with their dialectical relation. Individual images of the bourgeoisie, for example, are never caricatured (ef. Eisenstein) in sequences of their normal activities that are perfectly harmless in hemelves: relaxing at the beach, golfing, socializing at a cattle auction. But Solanas makes these smiling (and sometimes even attractive) human beings hideous and hateful ("monstrosity masquerading as beauty") by placing them in the same construction with images...
PROBABLY the most important early influences on Brazilian directors of the Cinema Novo movement, Rocha has commented, were the films and theoretical writings of Sergei Eisenstein and especially his concept of dialectical montage. This inter-cutting of images as "shocks" provides a language for expressing abstractly the confrontations between abstract forces of history, constructed into a coherent whole, an "agit-guinol" by the director, who intends to achieve a specific effect for the audience, which remains essentially passive. Rocha modifies this concept in developing the dialectical shot, in which each element-each character, myth, power-figure-comes into conflict with...
THIS goes way beyond Eisenstein's theories of cinema dialectics because it is anti-static. It doesn't conceive of thesis as separate from antithesis and resolved in a third shot which represents the synthesis. It accomplishes every scene in very long takes wherein antithesis appears, enters the frame, to oppose a thesis. The concrete relation between these two generates a provisional synthesis, which changes as one term becomes more powerful, and then changes into a new synthesis (a new order of the moment) as a new term enters the frame. To the truth of each image Rocha does...
Lang's presentation of social facts and events is equally direct. Lang says he tells his cameramen to give him nothing fancy, just "newsreel photography." The compositions of Fary, however, go beyond realism to present situations so explicitly that they verge on symbolic caricature, as in Eisenstein. We are repeatedly struck by shots of the raving lynch mob, Tracy, and the defendants looking into the camera. Even more powerful are the shots wherein the camera tracks right in on characters, or equivalently where characters run almost into the camera, then stop...