NEW DELHI: Today's
Google Doodle pays tribute to Russian filmmaker
Sergei Eisenstein
, who's renowned for the '
Odessa Steps
' sequence in his 1925 film '
Battleship Potemkin
'.
Eisenstein was a '
Soviet
' filmmaker, in that he was a Marxist, ideologically, and his films showcased the struggles of the downtrodden and the cruelty of the Tsarist regime. But he was far more than just a propagandist.
Eisenstein is credited for taking forward creatively the editing technique known as 'montage', which also means editing, in French.
Montage is the art and technique of moving picture editing in which contrasting shots or sequences are used to effect emotional or intellectual responses, according to Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.
In today's Doodle, Google uses film strips inspired by the iconic montage imagery from some of Eisenstein's films.
Essentially, Eisenstein believed that two images used together create a mental image far greater than the individual images. Therefore, 50 images taken together, communicate an emotion so powerful that dialogue is no match for it. This kind of "collision" of shots to produce a fast-paced sequence through editing, was for Eisenstein the essence of cinema.
Eisenstein used montage in the memorable 'Odessa Steps' sequence and at the time no one had ever seen anything like it. Below is a video of that sequence posted by 'Eyes on Cinema' on YouTube with an explainer by US director Roger Corman.
Eisenstein was born to a middle-class family in Latvia. He studied architecture and engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering. In 1918, Eisenstein left the institute and joined the Red Army to participate in the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1920, Eisenstein moved to Moscow and began working in theatre, in design and other areas.
That then led him to film and also to film theory which eventually influenced filmmakers around the world. In addition to 'Battleship Potemkin', Eisenstein's notable films are 'October: Ten days that shook the world', 'Strike', 'The general', 'Ivan the terrible' (2 parts) and 'Aleksander Nevsky'.