University of Southern California Postdoctoral Fellow and Cinephiliacs host Peter Labuza joins us to dissect the history of montage. Specifically, we discuss the use of montages in Pre-Code Hollywood cinema.
In the brief period between the introduction of synchronized sound and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production [AKA Hays] Code, artists like Slavko Vorkapich pioneered the use of montages: sequences which condense time and space to convey story beats, emotional states, and break the rules of conventional realism.
In this episode, we discuss:
The development of montage in Hollywood cinema between 1928 and 1935.
Theories of montage - Soviet montage, classical hollywood realism, and other frameworks.
Slavko Vorkapich and his montage-based experiments throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The transition from silent to cinema and sound cinema, and the implications on visual language.
The political dimensions that ran parallel to the development of montage.
Art, commerce, and the ways in which Hollywood films function as both business and expression.
Additional resources:
In this episode, we discuss a wide variety of Slavko Vorkapić’s work as an editor. Here are two short films he helmed:
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928)
Millions of Us (1935)
You can read some writing on these two films by Tanya Goldman and Spencer Nachman at the orphan film symposium.
And here’s two sequences that he was commissioned to do within feature films directed by others:
Mr. Smith Does to Washington (1939) [Excerpt]
Crime Without Passion (1934) [Excerpt]
And two other pre-code works that he was not involved with that are featured in our discussion:
So This is Harris! (1933)
Love Me Tonight (1932) [Excerpt]
Peter Labuza
Peter Labuza is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California, where he also earned his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies. His research explores the legal, financial, and political history of creative industries. His dissertation, “When A Handshake Meant Something: Lawyers, Deal Making, and the Emergence of New Hollywood” traces how new legal professionals and deal makers reshaped creative labor and financial management in Hollywood after World War II. He is currently working on a history of antitrust lawyers and radicalism in postwar America.
Labuza has received numerous fellowships and grants supporting his research from an array of archives and disciplines, including in legal, business, and Jewish history. He has published in The Velvet Light Trap, Mediascape, Film Quarterly, Sight & Sound, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and serves as assistant book review editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. He has published film criticism in Variety, The Village Voice, and Filmmaker Magazine, and hosts The Cinephiliacs podcast. Previously, Labuza earned both his BA and MA in Film Studies from Columbia University.