Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, born 1898 in Soviet Russia, was a film director and theorist. Known particularly well for his silent films he has since influenced almost every film maker since.
It was Eisenstein's writings on Montage in film which really captivated others. In these he says how he believed that Montage was the soul of cinema and that it could not only be used to emphasize the physical intentions of a director, but also could, by using 'linkage' of totally separate shots, could effect emotion and understanding.
Born in 1896 Dziga Vertov was again a Russian film theorist and director. He specialised in newsreel and documetry style film, whilst still workin in cinema. His practises lead the way for many techniques, none quite so famous as 'Cinéma vérité'
In french, 'Cinéma vérité' translates as 'Cinema of truth'. This is because it is used to describe a style of documentary filming that is very hash, brutal towards the topic and combines naturalistic techniques with more stylizes cinematic ones.
Lev Kuleshov was born in Soviet Russia in 1899 and was best known for setting up the Moscow Film School, the worlds first institute dedicated to teaching its pupils about Film. He, like the others believed strongly that the 'essence' of film making lay within the editing, the art of using montage to add substance to a scene. To demonstrate the power of this he came up with an experiment known as the 'Kuleshov Effect'. This was where his audience was shown a piece of film in which an actor was to have one fixed emotion for a number of different instances (ie. being shown delicious looking food, of a coffin) while the edit would cut from him, to the object, then back to the actor. Simply because the montage was well placed, the audience believed that the actor had changed, when in reality he had stayed exactly the same throughout. The audience were truly fooled and even raved about just how good his acting was!
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