#battleship_potemkin

This weeks readings focused on the concept of montage and how the sequencing of images in time can be used stylistically to highlight certain aspects of the images contained within. In the case of Battleship Potemkin (and the Soviet School in general), the focus of montage is often on showing opposition (sailors vs. officers, one vs. many, etc.) and with an emphasis on dialect and logical/concrete meaning rather than spiritual or psychic composition.

For my semester project I have been focusing on learning how to use DeepDream (a gradient ascent method invented by google in 2015 using TensorFlow to find patterns in noise based on training data). I have fed it some previously-created images, shown here:

Without resampling image, the result is low resolution and blurry. I also attempted to find patterns in too small of regions, making the result indistinguishable from noise in some parts of the image (image 1). Resampling image to process smaller chunks + setting octaves (minimum size to find a pattern within) gives a better result (image 2). This was made using a pre-trained model from Keras called InceptionV3 (this is the default model used by DeepDream). I would like to try to run the same algorithm using different pre-trained models from both Keras and Caffe.

Through the reading, it was very interesting to think about how with montage, Deleuze calls the unit of time in movement images to be an action rather than how we typically segment time through defined number of minutes, hours, or days. Through the interplay of the placement of these actions, we can create contrast between the organic and the inorganic or for dialects between two sides of the montage, among other ways to create links between acts that lead from the start to the end that shows the development and resolution of the conflict. These come to be what Deleuze indicates as different schools of montage. Additionally, the set of the action can be close-up or far away, giving either room for the viewer to fill in the environment through their imagination or define the entirety of the scene, allows for the an intimate subjectivity to be felt in the objective set.

In the film, the procession of time was told fully through the jumping between action to action. Every scene, something was happening and not necessarily in sequential order or in the same spatial cadence of time. The conflict between the two sides of the working class and the authorities develops through the dialogue created with the slices of common people’s sources of anger and unrest with the poor delegation of resolution by the people in power.

From the reading, one of the most interesting themes the author creates is the description of a montage as an “organism” or “organic.”  For example, the author describes Griffith’s description which matches this in that there are many different types of montages but all are montages in the end, forming parallels to humans. Next then, within this organism, there must exist conflict and thus contributes to this image of a changing being that corroborates with the general feeling of motion and movement the author emphasizes. Finally, the organism must or if often threatened. This interpretation of an organism is then commented and critiqued; for example, one interesting change is the inclusion of some aspect of development or generation.

My curiosity was peaked by the discussion in part of the reading about the many ways to convey time through implying motion or stillness. The two above images are from Gance’s La Roue and  Rene Clare’s The Crazy Ray - in the first, Gance is using mechanical movement as a tool for time, while Clare picks out key points to use as a way to distort movement - restart, reverse, accelerate, slow. 

I am quite intrigued by the passage of time and how to convey the experience of it (not just necessarily how it appears). I appreciate the concept of montage for its offering of a diversity of methods for slicing, blending, looping, or otherwise remixing time. Film, necessarily, must find ways to appropriately offer up time so that it is palatable to viewers and suitable to the story. 

This week’s reading is on the Montage, and the different ways that film shows the passage of time in moving pictures. Personally, I found this reading difficult because I do not have a lot of film background and consequently don’t have a grasp of the references. Regardless, I found the reading’s exploration of time and how people portray it in different ways to be interesting. It follows a very common pattern between “western” (American) and “eastern” (Chinese) media that I have seen before. Essientaly, the western tendency to portray time as linear and scalable, and the Asian tendency to see time as a circle. However, the films brought up in this reading further expand the different ways.

One comparison that I found striking is an “organic” compared to a “dialectical” representation: The organic portrayal demonstrates how a situation is “established or transformed through the intermediary of a … convergence of actions” (31). From what I understood, this is an individualist viewpoint where it is comparatively fixed in dimensions- whether that is location, space, or consciousness. In comparison, the Soviet School’s “dielectric” view shows a repeating spiral of contrasting views, which “act and react on each other to show how they simultaneously enter into conflict” (30), eventually spiraling into the result. 

Another axis is movement: as brought by the french school, where the relative scale is distorted in movement. One note I am drawn to is the idea that as long as there is a “homogenous” unit of measurement, “one can easily go to infinity, but only abstractly” (46). However “when the unit of measurement is variable, [we are] no longer capable of comprehending the set of magnitudes” (46). This brings into question our objective sense of time and scale, as rationed by science, but constantly distorted by our own consciousness.  

I’m grateful for today’s discussion in class on the importance of the montage to film. I was previously aware of Eisenstein’s sequence diagrams that were used as a design tool to storyboard narrative and music, so I had a little background understanding regarding an idea of montage, but not to the extent that he was someone who changed film as a medium through his use of montage techniques. I think it finally clicked when Lara was showing the various clips in class that montage, as opposed to long and steady (theater style) single shots, is used in almost all video media today, although that was something I’ve definitely taken for granted.

Griffith is a bourgeois (and a racist bourgeois at that). He revolutionizes cinema by conceiving montage as a duel between antagonistic forces, man vs. woman, rich vs. poor, good vs. bad, and by creating a rhythmic progression that leads to a conclusion — or not. With us, or against us. In Deleuze’s reading, this way of thinking about montage is bourgeois because it takes the opposite poles as given, as natural, as independent of context, whereas one was not born a man or a woman, rich or poor, but one becomes it. Social qualities are dialectical, not absolute. They depend on power relations and not on birth: being a bourgeois is, by definition, being racist (and vice-versa). Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, did not only please the U.S. (white) middle class; it also led to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Eisenstein, while inheriting from Griffith, is also criticizing him: Eisenstein is a cinematographer of context and dialectic, exploitation and revolution (whereas Griffith is a eulogist of eugenics and white supremacy, false consciousness and the manifest destiny). Deleuze sees in Eisenstein’s reliance on the golden ratio a visual and temporal manifestation of his revolutionary cinema. I’ll take one example from Battleship Potemkin to illustrate the dialectical nature of Eisenstein’s visual compositions. 

The first scene of the film shows the deck of the Potemkin. Two sailors are discussing the 1905 revolution and wish their crew would join the workers. They are overshadowed by massive chimneys; the battle that runs through the film is made evident: it is going to be man against machine, freedom against industrial capitalism, life against death. Man occupies the smaller part of the spiral; machine dominates. 

Golden ratio still in the execution scene — but places have moved. Machine is clearly winning; man is losing. It is only through a resurgence of consciousness — visible in the close ups of the aggrieved sailor of the first scene, who gains an understanding of the situation and of the sailors’ own collective strength — that the subjugation of man is overcome, and that the masses gain an upper hand on the world of machines: the sailors take over the battleship.

While the Potemkin sails toward Odessa, the population of the city rises and descends upon the shore. Golden ratio still, but the wheel has turned again; infrastructure, the world of technique, is now a conduct for revolutionary practice. The very machinery of capitalism, by connecting the masses and their grievances, dialectically leads to the demise of capitalism. Rosa Luxembourg, witnessing the 1905 revolution, started believing in the power of infrastructure to unify workers and bring them together as a formidable political force, a force which “flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams.” 

Bridges and stairs, railways and pipelines, piers and steamships bring about the proletarian revolution by funneling the billows and streams of human consciousness. Deleuze writes that “the spiral progresses by growing through oppositions or contradictions”; but what comes out of it is the new power of matter, the ability of steel to decide of human destiny. This epiphany of the Potemkin, which closes the film — golden ratio, again and finally — is left unquestioned by Eisenstein, whose epics of freedom might — perhaps — also be qualified of “bourgeois.”

References:

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986, chapter 3.