Editing in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat

Alfred Hitchcock once said "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out" (brainyquote.com). This is basically the essence of his idea that films are not real life because real life is quintessentially boring. This quote also shows the essence of the principals of soviet montage; in which Hitchcock used some of its techniques. The theoretical premise of soviet montage was heavy editing, which applies itself to Hitchcock's assertions that all films should have the boring everyday situations in life cut out. Hitchcock learned a great deal from soviet montage theorists and utilized some of their basic techniques in his film Lifeboat (1944). This montage style is extremely useful in this film because of the circumstances of its setting and some of its individual scenes are edited in this style in order to retrieve certain audience reactions. And the overall style of these montage techniques suited Lifeboat in a way that serves its effectiveness in front of this audience.

Soviet montage was a technique that was used by Russian film directors in order to express their love for Marxist views. It involves heavy editing, increased long shots, and the juxtaposition of images, some random, to get across their point. V.I. Pudovkin was the creator of this type of cinema during the 1920s. Some of his experiments included inter-cutting close-ups of a man or woman with passive faces of no emotion with shots of a dog, a plate of food, a child, or a coffin (answers.com). In this style, actors are used as raw material just like the other inanimate objects, which explains montage directors' use of nonprofessional actors (Giannetti, 165). One of the most active users of soviet montage during this period in time was the director Sergei Eisenstein. He believed that the essence of existence was constant change and anything that appeared to be unified or stationary in nature was only temporary. However, he disagreed with Pudovkin in the nature of his editing. Instead of a first shot A and a second shot B resulting in an audience reaction and knowledge of AB, the result is a completely new idea known as C (Giannetti, 167).