Vertov, like all the Soviet avant-garde directors, wanted cinema to change the way its viewers saw the world. To engineer the Soviet consciousness, they hit upon a new technique - montage. By intercutting shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage aimed to manipulate the audience's reactions, directing them to the ideas the director wanted them to reach. Lev Kuleshov was the first director to use montage in the cinema - long before it was adopted in the West. He came to the technique by accident, when the chronic shortages of film stock in the civil war led him to experiment with making new movies by cutting up and rearranging bits of old ones. The scarcity of film compelled all the early Soviet directors to plan out scenes on paper first (storyboarding). This had the effect of reinforcing the intellectual composition of their films as a sequence of symbolic movements and gestures. Kuleshov believed that the visual meaning of the film was best communicated by the arrangement (montage) of the frames, and not by the content of the individual shots, as practised in the silent films and even in the early montage experiments of D. W. Griffith in America. According to Kuleshov, it was through the mon-tage of contrasting images that cinema could create meaning and
emotions in the audience. To demonstrate his theory he intercut a single neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin with three different visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a women's body laid out in a coffin, and a child at play. It turned out that the audience interpreted the meaning of the close-up according to the context in which it was placed, seeing hunger in Mozzukhin's face in the first sequence, grief in the second, and joy in the third, although the three shots of him were identical.50 All the other great Soviet film directors of the 1920s used montage: Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Boris Barnet and, in its most intellectualized form, Sergei Eisenstein. Montage was so central to the visual effect of Soviet experimental cinema that its exponents were afraid that their medium would be destroyed by the arrival of film sound. The essence of film art, as these directors saw it, lay in the orchestration of the visual images and the use of movement and of mimicry to suggest emotions and ideas. The introduction of a verbal element was bound to reduce film to a cheap surrogate for the theatre. With the advent of sound, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proposed to use it 'contrapuntally', contrasting sound with images as an added element of the montage.51
Montage required a different kind of acting, capable of conveying the meaning of the film quickly and economically. Much of the theory behind this new acting was derived from the work of Francois Delsarte and Emile Jacques Dalcroze, who had developed systems of mime, dance and rhythmic gymnastics (eurhythmies). The system was based on the idea that combinations of movements and gestures could be used to signal ideas and emotions to the audience, and this same idea was applied by Kuleshov to both the training of the actors and the montage editing for cinema.
The Delsarte-Dalcroze system had been brought to Russia by Prince Sergei Volkonsky in the early 1910s. The grandson of the Decembrist had been Director of the Imperial Theatre between 1899 and 1901, but was sacked after falling out with the prima ballerina (and mistress of the Tsar) Mathilde Kshesinskaya. The cause of his dismissal was a farthingale. Kshesinskaya had refused to wear one in the ballet
