Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

12.2 Visual juxtaposition: film
Unit 12 Juxtaposition
Section 3 Attributing meaning

The use of juxtaposition based on tension between communicative elements is not limited to verbal texts. Indeed, one early theoretician of film - the Soviet director, Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) - in his account of montage (selection, cutting, piecing together as a consecutive whole) made discontinuity between successive shots central to his account of how film should work. In contrast to the dominant strand of cinematic development associated with commercial cinema and Hollywood, in which editing aspires to continuity and smoothness of transition between shots, early Soviet cinema, particularly that of Eisenstein, attempted to produce collisions rather than continuity between successive shots in order to create quite startling juxtapositions. Eisenstein argued that, by introducing a gap or tension between successive images, it was possible to generate meaning beyond that contained within the shots themselves. For instance, in two famous images from consecutive shots in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925), the first image shows a medium close-up of a woman’s face wearing pince-nez or glasses, and the second image presents the same woman, but now the eye is bleeding and the pince-nez is shattered. The overall effect is that of a shot hitting the eye, even though the latter action is not explicitly displayed. These images are part of a larger episode, commonly referred to as the ’Odessa Steps sequence’, in which soldiers brutally attempt to put down a popular uprising. Images of boots marching down steps and of rifle volleys are intercut with images of a child’s pram rolling unattended down the steps and a small boy being trampled underfoot. (Parts of this sequence may be viewed at http://www.carleton.edu/curricular/MEDA/classes/ media110/Severson/potemkin.htm.)

As well as creating a powerful sense of movement and confusion, these stark juxtapositions force the viewer to make the connection between the soldiers’ actions and the suffering of the defenceless people. In this way, montage as a collision between images can here be seen as replicating larger contradictions between contending social forces. Indeed, juxtaposition for Eisenstein was part of a self-consciously Marxist and dialectical approach to film-making, not only emphasizing discontinuity between images but (like Bertolt Brecht in the theatre) also demanding the active interpretive engagement of the audience.

Figures 12.1-12.4 Images from the Odessa Steps sequence, Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)