Montage, Dialectic, and the Jason Fulford Exercise

The Kuleshov Effect

Before Eisenstein, there's Kuleshov. Lev Kuleshov took one shot of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin's face, expression neutral, and cut it against three different follow-up shots: a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan. Audiences reported seeing three different emotions in the exact same shot of the actor's face: hunger, grief, desire, depending only on what came next.

Covered in the assigned video, The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage, starting at 4:16.

Diagram: the same neutral face shot is cut against three different follow-up shots (soup, coffin, divan), producing three different read emotions (hunger, grief, desire)

Montage and the Marxist Dialectic (Intellectual montage in the method below)

Eisenstein takes Kuleshov's discovery further. For Eisenstein, montage isn't linking two shots so their meanings add up. It's collision: two shots in conflict, cut together, and the collision itself produces a new idea that wasn't in either shot alone.

Diagram: at the bottom, Shot A (thesis) and Shot B (antithesis) collide to produce a new concept (synthesis). That synthesis rises to become the next thesis, colliding with Shot C (a new antithesis) to produce a second, higher synthesis at the top, a perpetual conflict building upward rather than addition

Shot A (thesis) collides with Shot B (antithesis) at the bottom of the diagram. The collision produces a new concept (synthesis), not a sum, and that synthesis rises to become the next thesis. It collides again, this time with Shot C (a new antithesis), producing a second, higher synthesis at the top. It's a perpetual conflict that keeps climbing, not a settled endpoint.

Watch the worked example in The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage, starting at 8:38:

An authority figure looking over a crowd + the crowd fleeing on the Odessa Steps collide into "Suppression by the State"
"Suppression by the State" (now the thesis) + a close shot of a helpless, huddled figure collide into "Helplessness"
"Helplessness" (now the thesis) + soldiers firing collide into "Brutal Oppression"

Eisenstein's Five Methods of Montage

Eisenstein didn't think of montage as one technique. In his 1929 essay "Methods of Montage" he named five, in order of increasing abstraction.

Covered in The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage, starting at 9:25.

Method	What sets the cut
Metric	A fixed, measured shot length, set in advance, regardless of what's happening inside the frame
Rhythmic	The movement inside the frame itself, cuts land where the on-screen motion says they should
Tonal	The emotional tone or mood of a shot, not just its movement
Overtonal	Metric, rhythmic, and tonal all working at once, layered into one combined effect
Intellectual	Two unrelated shots collide to produce an abstract idea that's in neither shot alone

Intellectual montage is the method from the collision diagram above. Eisenstein treated it as the highest, most abstract method, the one closest to pure dialectical collision, thesis and antithesis colliding into a concept rather than a mood or a rhythm.

How to Play Fulfords Visual Dominos

Jason Fulford / Aperture On Sight, Lesson 2, "This Equals That."

How to play: Lay a photo down, then find one visual element it shares with a second photo (color is the easiest starting point) and place that photo next to it. From the second photo, pick a different shared element (shape is usually next) and find a third photo that matches it. Keep the chain going, one link at a time, each link picking a new element to match on. Color and shape are the easy, obvious links. Push the class toward harder ones as the chain grows: composition, focus, gesture, mood.

This Equals That Vocabulary

Nine categories Fulford uses to pair photographs:

Shape - a cut-out geometric form paired with a found shape in the world
Subject - two photographs of the same kind of thing, in different settings
Texture - two surfaces that read the same way even though they're unrelated objects
Form - a three-dimensional shape echoed by an unrelated object
Pattern - a repeating structure in one photo matched to a repeating structure in another
Line - a curved or straight line carried from one image into the next
Color - a dominant color in one photo picked up in the next
2D vs. 3D - a flat, graphic image paired with a dimensional, sculptural one
Sign vs. Symbol - a literal directional sign paired with an image that reads symbolically

From Montage to Fulford: What's the Difference?

Eisenstein's montage is sequential (one shot, then the next, in time) and built on conflict: it's arguing for something.

Fulford's Visual Dominoes works differently. It's spatial, not sequential (two photos sit next to each other at once), and it's built on resemblance, not conflict: a shared color, shape, or texture, not a collision of opposites. It notices a rhyme instead of staging an argument.

Open question for the class: is a diptych automatically a montage? A pairing built on visual rhyme (Fulford's game) borrows montage's side-by-side structure but skips its dialectical collision. A pairing built on contrast or contradiction is closer to what Eisenstein means. Which kind is more interesting for Assignment 2?