#MediaMonday: Eisenstein Course Series
Good Morning Everyone, After a hopefully restful break, we are back at it!
As we return to our classrooms, I wanted to provide teachers with an immediately useful resource that required almost no additional demand on the educator. In this way, you can start plugging in a lesson weekly for all of January and start students off with an additional resource that will change the way they look at cinematography and videography. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and I am really looking forward to sharing it with you.
Therefore, today's lesson topic is: Sergei Eisenstein's Graphic Conflicts.
In 1919, shortly following the Bolshevik Revolution, the work's first film school in began in Moscow. Amongst the teachers were two men who would forever change film and film studies: Lev Kuleshov (yes, the "Kuleshov effect" Kuleshov) and Sergei Eisenstein. In addition to being the grandfather of Soviet Montaging theory and a great director and filmmaker, Eisenstein developed a unique concept about shot composition.
Eisenstein observed that the most interesting shots were those that created what he called "conflicts" or "violences" on the screen. These were shots with things like colliding lines and staggering depths of field. He created a theory about these conflicts where he identified a variety of graphic conflicts for critics to looks for and for cinematographers to aspire to. These are now known as Eisenstein's Graphic Conflicts.
While there are far more that this, I have shot a special STN Crash Course video series detailing and defining four of Eisenstein's Graphic Conflicts with examples from real films! The conflicts that I focused on were the conflicts of mass, lines, depth and planes. For each of these conflicts, I have created a freestanding video that will be released weekly on STN Social Media beginning with an intro video and the conflict of lines.
The beauty of Eisenstein's conflicts is that practically every image in both broadcast journalism and film uses a graphic conflict in some way or another. What this means in practicality is that any student of visual media can benefit from learning these conflicts. They equip our students with the right words for critiquing visual storytelling and it makes them more conscious producers of media.
Try them out in your class as a bellringer or even as a production challenge; I assure you that your students will never look at an image quite the same again and how great of a day is it when our students see the world in a new way?
Talk to you soon,
Josh Cantrell
