Frankie Goes To Hollywood Editing Analysis

Amidst a sea of political propaganda in Russia, arose a man who would forever revolutionize film editing, a man named Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein recognized five unique styles of editing, and named them the Metric Montage, Rhythmic Montage, Tonal Montage, Overtonal Montage, and Intellectual Montage. To this day, he has inspired many filmmakers with his montage theories, especially those of the early music video industry. One music video in particular, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes (Video Destructo Mix)", competently displays the Metric, Rhythmic, Tonal, and Intellectual Montages. The Godley and Creme-directed video of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood single, "Two Tribes", made great use of Eisenstein's Montage Theories, the most rudimentary of them being the Metric Montage. Metric Montage is based purely on the physical nature of time, cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image, to control the tempo. In "Two Tribes", we see an example of this from the 1 minute 30 second mark to about the 2 minute mark. The cuts are made about every second, as if controlled by a metronome, raising the tempo, thus raising the drama and anticipation. Even though the cuts from the main fight between Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko, to the gambling audience of the United Nations, and finally to the reporter in front of the camera seem to flow very rhythmically, it is not to be mistaken for a Rhythmic Montage. The Rhythmic Montage is used to keep the pace of the film, accentuated by music, but not constrained by the precise number of frames, like the Metric Montage. …show more content…
One example of this in "Two Tribes" appears at the 3 minute 20 second mark, to the 3 minute 50 second mark, syncing the cuts to the beat of the music, stressing the confrontation that is being depicted. We see a second example towards the end of the video from the 5 minute 53 second mark to the end of the video. As both the cuts and the beat of the music grow quicker, shifting from Reagan and Chernenko fighting, to images of eradication, all of this underlines the inevitable destruction caused from the conflict. Where the Rhythmic Montage is defined by the flow of editing, the remaining two theories rely more on the contents of the shots. Aside from the manipulation of the temporal length of the cuts and its rhythmic flow with the Metric and Rhythmic Montages, the Tonal Montage sets an emotional tone through the use of a framing motif. Case in point for the Tonal …show more content…
Bored with the predictability of the A+B=AB formula for the previously mentioned montage styles, Eisenstein came up with the Intellectual Montage, also known as Eisensteinian Montage, being the most complex of all five theories, with a new formula of A+B=C. Using shots outside of the film, you can create a new meaning, like the example in the music video we have been discussing, from the 4 minute mark to about the 5 minute mark. While there is visual text here in these cuts, more importantly is what is implied just by the use of visuals, such as the cut to the reporter drawing scratch marks on the screen, showing that the fight plus that imagery equals the reporter mocking the whole thing as a cat fight. Another example in that timestamp is the image of Chernenko juxtaposed with a war tank, symbolizing how unstoppable this man is in his