A controlled versus an uncontrolled narrative perspective Early German v. Early Russian Filmmaking essays

A controlled versus an uncontrolled narrative perspective Early German v. Early Russian Filmmaking essays The primary difference between the early Russian films of the first half of the 20th century, and those films that exemplify the artistic ethos of the German Expressionist movement is that of the significance given to narrative and to expressing a singular and coherent ideology for the viewer. While Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" has a clear narrative and ideological gloss, German Expressionistic films such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" encourage viewers to accompany the director through a series of images that take him or her on an internal, expressive journey within him or herself, creating subjective associations within the unconscious that The way this effect is accomplished is through, in the case of Russian filmmakers such as Eisenstein, through what is termed an "associative process" of narrative interaction with the audience. In other words, the narrative and descriptive sequences of the film are manipulated over the course of the film to invest particular images and aspects of the film with great importance. The viewer remembers these images as important narrative markers, and also invests such images with an associative ideological context within the significance of the film. However these markers possess a relatively limited frame of significance in the sense that a viewer is not allowed carte blanche to assign meaning to these images, based purely on personal associations. Rather, the viewer is overwhelmed with copious quantities of shapes, objects, and lines, but all of a similar nature, thus giving meaning to and emphasizing an audience's response. For instance, in "Battleship Potemkin," the audience's experience of different members of the crew washing dishes, and cleaning the ship, all with circular motions, give a sense of continual, labored business. If the audience does not comprehend the busy quality of the ship, the implications ...