Montage and Metaphor
The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein showed how juxtaposing one image with another (montage) could create a third idea by associating the two (metaphor). In this famous example from October, Eisenstein cuts from a scene of post-Tsarist leader Kerensky to a shot of a mechanical peacock and back to Kerensky to reveal not only the leader’s vanity but also the mechanistic, anti-human nature of his politics.
mechanical peacock
Kerensky
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Nazi film propaganda exploited the power of metaphorical montage. These frames from the anti-Semitic film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) associate Jews with rats. Notice that both the rats and the humans move from right to left (a more sinister, unsettling direction than right to left–the normal order of reading).
Der Ewige Jude 1
Der Ewige Jude 2
Der Ewige Jude 3
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The John McCain TV ad “Fact Check” visually compares wolves to the team of lawyers allegedly sent to Alaska to discredit Sarah Palin. (For the full background on this charge, see the article by Factcheck.org). But the real association is not wolves = lawyers, but wolves = Obama (yet another attack on Obama’s humanity). Notice how the wolves initially run from left to right, but one wolf turns facing left. A head shot of Barack Obama appears in the following frames, facing left as well.
Wolves 1
Wolf facing left
Obama facing left 1
Obama facing left 2
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