Vsevolod Pudovkin, born 1893, was a Russian-born director, screenwriter, and actor who is responsible for many modern leading principles of montage. He was imspired by the movie ‘Intolerance’ by D. W. Griffith. Pudovkin came up with the “Five Relational Editing Techniques”, which are as follows. Contrast. Parallelism. Symbolism. Simultaneity. Leitmotif. I will go through these in order, explaining the Pudovkin’s definitions and giving example when I can. Contrast challenges the viewers to compare two contrasting scenes. Generally this is done by cutting back and forth from one proposing scene, to an opposing scene. I thought a good example of this, although slightly divergent, was in ‘500 Days of Summer’ where they literally have two scenes …show more content…
A nice example of this is in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, where you see a scene of young Bruce Wayne whose parents has just been shot cut to scene of older Bruce Wayne. Symbolism is the use of one thing to represent something else – as a flower next a gun represents peace next to war. In the movie ‘Pacific Rim’ two characters lose their shoes. Most people have not realised that this a symbolism for the fact that two people have to work together to pilot the Jaegers that kill Kaiju (who are wreaking havoc on the human race). Simultaneity is when actions are shown happening in two different locations. This gives you the idea that they are happening at the same time – which is not always true. This is also called cross-cutting and can be seen in The Dark Knight (the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy) when there is a hostage situation on two boats. This is cross cut, multiple times, with Batman and Lieutenant Jim Gordon trying to handle the situation. There is another cross-cut in this scene as they are also cross-cutting what’s happening on either boat. All of these situations are happening at the same time in this