Vsevolod Pudovkin

Pudovkin was one of the pilots of the theories of action pact montages, in films which are used to tell a short anecdote, to create an emotional effect. Pudovkin’s techniques describe several ways editing can be used to enhance the viewer’s understanding of a story, and they’re all designed to create a specific reaction from the audience, something which he calls relational editing.

Contrast: cutting between two different scenarios to highlight the contrast between them. Pudovkin suggests moving from scenes of poverty to someone really rich to make the difference more apparent and realistic.

Parallelism: here you can connect two seemingly unrelated scenes by cutting between them and focusing on parallel features. For example if you were shooting a documentary about fisherman catching all kinds of fish then killing them and if they don’t want them they would just chuck them back in the sea in the Atlantic, you could then cut from a unwanted dead fish begin thrown back into the ocean to a family chomping down on some fish’n’chips. This shows that both scenes drawing our attention to the fish. It creates a relationship between the two scenes in the viewers’ mind.

Symbolism: you move from your main scene to something which creates a symbolic connection for the audience. In the film living in Soviet Russia Pudovkin suggested cutting between shots of striking workers being shot by Tsarist police and scenes of cows being slaughtered. The audience’s mind then associates the slaughter of the cattle with the slaughter of the workers.

Simultaneity: This is used lots in Hollywood today: cutting between two simultaneous events as a way of building up suspense within the audience.  For example if you watching an action film and there is just about to be a big fight you might cut between the bad guys preparing all their weapons for the battle, and between the good guy saying by the his family members just in case he does not survive. This then creates tension and atmosphere within the audience

Leit motif: This ‘reiteration of theme’ involves repeating a shot or sequence at key moments as a sort of code. For example in Jaws when the audience sees a point of view shot of the shark in the water the audiences automatically knows that the shark is about to attack.