The primary difference between the early Russian films of the first
             half of the 20th century, and those films that exemplify the artistic ethos
             of the German Expressionist movement is that of the significance given to
             narrative and to expressing a singular and coherent ideology for the
             viewer. While Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" has a clear narrative and
             ideological gloss, German Expressionistic films such as "The Cabinet of Dr.
             Caligari" encourage viewers to accompany the director through a series of
             images that take him or her on an internal, expressive journey within him
             or herself, creating subjective associations within the unconscious that
             The way this effect is accomplished is through, in the case of Russian
             filmmakers such as Eisenstein, through what is termed an "associative
             process" of narrative interaction with the audience. In other words, the
             narrative and descriptive sequences of the film are manipulated over the
             course of the film to invest particular images and aspects of the film with
             great importance. The viewer remembers these images as important narrative
             markers, and also invests such images with an associative ideological
             context within the significance of the film. However these markers possess
             a relatively limited frame of significance in the sense that a viewer is
             not allowed carte blanche to assign meaning to these images, based purely
             on personal associations. Rather, the viewer is overwhelmed with copious
             quantities of shapes, objects, and lines, but all of a similar nature, thus
             giving meaning to and emphasizing an audience's response.
             For instance, in "Battleship Potemkin," the audience's experience of
             different members of the crew washing dishes, and cleaning the ship, all
             with circular motions, give a sense of continual, labored business. If the
             audience does not comprehend the busy quality of the ship, the implications
             ...