From the early days of cinema (late nineteenth/ early twentieth century) through the 1960s, theories of film tended to divide into the opposing camps of Formalism and Realism.  Formalists emphasized the formal properties of cinema that shaped the way films were made, as well as our responses to them.  For the formalists, the challenge was to establish film as an independent art form.  In virtue of what, they might ask, is a film of Romeo & Juliet any more than a mere recording of a dramatisation of the play?  Doesn’t a camera just provide a mechanical recording of reality? They found their answer in film’s formal properties, which enable the filmmaker to alter reality – to create a new world within the dimensions of the cinema screen.  Formalist filmmaking reached its peak in the Soviet Montage of the 1920s.  Here, Sergei Eistenstein, among others, utilised the formal property of editing to startling effect through the process of intellectual montage. This process is demonstrated in the famous Odessa Staircase scene in Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925). Continue reading →