Class 11 questions
Using Sklar, answer the following questions about each of the figures and ideas listed below: 1) who was this person? What is their biography (in brief), 2) explain their most prominent theory of film (each group will be assigned a theory), and 3) what were their most prominent films and how did they put their theory into practice?
1. Lev Kuleshov and the “Kuleshov Effect”
2. Sergei Eisenstein and the “Theory of Montage”
3. Dziga Vertov and “Kino-Pravda”
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
-Pay attention to your own experience of spectatorship while watching this film. Do you feel excited or gripped by the narrative? Why or why not?
-Pay attention to the process of characterization in this film. Are there main characters in the way there was in the other narrative films we’ve seen? What are the formal similarities and differences in the way the characters are portrayed between, say, Griffith and Eisenstein? Why might Eisenstein have chosen to do things differently?
-Pay close attention to the editing in the film. What techniques do you see here that seem different or similar to editing techniques we’ve already seen (for instance in Griffith’s films or Micheaux’s)?
