Lotman and Eisenstein - Film

The first author, Yuri Lotman, focused mainly on the semiotics of film. It was interesting to see the mention of "syntax" when it came to the way that a cinematographer would compose his shots. I had never really thought of film in the terms of language, that is, I never pictured that a film could have a unique syntax. However, after reading this article, it started to make sense. The way that the shots are laid out are very similar to the way that words are laid out in a sentence. Put something, a shot or a specific word, and it changes the meaning. This makes the process of making a film very interesting and more complicated then I had ever thought of before.
Another part that I found interesting from the article about Lotman was the idea that people come to movies with outside influence. The idea that people who watch movies are influenced by their political, societal, or any other outside influences was very new to me. But, once again, it makes complete sense. Everything around us influences us whether we know it or not. So it can be seen that we would drag these influences into the movies when we go to watch them, sometimes without even realizing it.

When it came to Eisenstein, even more ideas sprang up. The writing on Eisenstein focused mainly on his idea of montage. The writing described his argument with a friend about what it means to be a montage. His friend argued that a montage is more like putting pieces together. This is how I had always thought of a montage being so I was surprised when Eisenstein said otherwise. He described a montage as a collision more then the "brick" method that his friend had stated. From this collision, Eisenstein said that "...from the collision of two given factors arises a concept." This was of thinking in terms of what a montage is was completely new to me. I tried to think of what that meant but that was difficult to imagine what Eisenstein meant by this. Apparently, so did he. The article goes on to say that he had a hard time trying to flesh out what this meant and changed his meaning of "montage" from a collision to a "fusion".
This made more sense. In the same way of thinking that Lotman described, the fusion that Eisenstein described is the idea that people bring what they see in movies and mix them in with reality. This carries a heavy semiotic idea with it and is a much easier explanation to understand when talking about what it means to say "Montage".