Overview
Montage, French for "assembly", means the editing of shots into a sequence. In the 1920s Soviet filmmakers searching for a new revolutionary art and means of persuasion argued that editing was what set cinema apart from the other arts. Their ideas are known collectively as Soviet montage theory.
The Kuleshov effect
Lev Kuleshov of the Moscow State Film School is known for an experiment in which a shot of an actor's expressionless face was intercut with different shots, such as a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin and a woman on a couch, and viewers read hunger, grief and desire into the same face. The original footage does not survive and the experiment is known mainly from accounts by Pudovkin and others, but it became the emblem of the idea that a shot's meaning depends on its context.
Pudovkin: linkage
Kuleshov's student Vsevolod Pudovkin, in Film Technique (English translation 1929), saw shots as bricks built up into scenes. He stressed linkage: joining shots smoothly through contrast, parallelism, symbolism, simultaneity and leitmotif to guide the viewer's emotions and attention.
Eisenstein: collision
Sergei Eisenstein argued instead that when shots collide, a new meaning emerges that exists in neither shot alone. He cited Marxist dialectics (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and Chinese compound characters, such as mouth + bird = "to sing". He distinguished five methods of montage:
- Metric: rhythm created by shot length regardless of content.
- Rhythmic: shot length combined with movement within the shot.
- Tonal: shots linked by emotional tone, such as light and shape.
- Overtonal: the combined effect of the previous methods.
- Intellectual: combining shots to evoke abstract concepts or ideas.
The Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925), rapidly intercutting marching soldiers, falling citizens and a runaway pram, became one of the most analysed scenes in film history. His essays were collected in English in Film Form (1949) and other volumes.
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Criticism and influence
The French critic André Bazin objected that editing imposes meaning on the viewer and championed the long take and deep focus, which show real space and time without cutting. Even so, montage theory became, alongside Hollywood continuity editing, part of the basic vocabulary of film editing, and it lives on in the fast cutting of advertising, music videos and trailers and in the "montage sequence" that compresses the passage of time. For narrative structure and audience response, see also storytelling theory.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-16
References
- Pudovkin, V. I. (1929). Film Technique (I. Montagu, Trans.). London: George Newnes.
- Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (J. Leyda, Ed. & Trans.). New York: Harcourt, Brace.
- Bazin, A. (1967). What Is Cinema? (Vol. 1; H. Gray, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.