Attraction assembly

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Under attraction assembly or montage of attractions means a in the 1920s by Sergei Eisenstein developed concept for its theater - and film work that through aggression should free and sensual stimulation of the viewer more bourgeois aesthetic ideas in art reception. The concept of attraction assembly was rejected as formalistic in the Stalin era since the early 1930s for ideological reasons .

The Russian Revolution of 1917 led to new developments in art and aesthetics in the emerging Soviet Union , which questioned the concept of art in bourgeois society and aimed at a socialist culture in which the developing collective became the focus of interest. In film art, this led to the establishment of the genre of the revolutionary film .

In 1923 Eisenstein published his work Montage der Attractions , in which he presented his aesthetic concept for the Moscow workers' theater of proletarian culture on the basis of his staging of Ostrowski's play A Stupidity Makes Even the Smartest. Through the montage in the representation, the cumulative combined stringing of ever new sensational performances and aggressive sensory stimuli aimed at the shock effect of the viewer, the viewer should be able to free himself from traditional ideas of art and be able to change in the sense of a revolutionary development towards socialist people. For this performance, Eisenstein drew inspiration from the Grand Guignol Theater, the circus world , the variety show and other forms of popular entertainment culture. In his theater production, Eisenstein used fencing fights, tightrope acts , couplets , dance performances and the inclusion of film sequences as surprise effects .

In his publication Montage der Filmattraktionen in 1924, Eisenstein also implemented his concept for film art based on his film Strike . Detached from spatial and temporal contexts, the film should trigger the stimulating effect on the audience through the means of editing . Chains of association should help to lead from an affective grasp of what is shown to an intellectual understanding of the relationships presented. For example, in Strike Eisenstein cut pictures from a slaughterhouse against the scenes in which the strikers are murdered by the capitalists . The viewer should therefore first be emotionally stimulated by the shock effect of the unusually assembled images and then be led to an understanding of social contexts that equates the capitalists with cattle butchers.

In his conception, Eisenstein placed the power of the proletarian masses in the foreground and renounced the cinematic processing of individual fates in order not to distract the viewer in his political awareness through the possible identification with individual protagonists.

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