Montage theory, in its rudimentary form, asserts that a series of connected images allows for complex ideas to be extracted from a sequence and, when strung together, constitute the entirety of a film's ideological and intellectual power. In other words, the editing of shots rather than the content of the shot alone constitutes the force of a film. Many directors still believe that montage is what defines cinema against other specific media. Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin, for example, claimed that words were thematically inadequate, despite silent cinema's use of
intertitles to make narrative connections between shots. Steve Odin traces montage back to
Charles Dickens' use of the concept to track parallel action across a narrative.
History •
Continuity editing – Continuity, like montage, situates editing as the driving formal element of
narrative film making. Continuity differs from montage in both its production, effect and intention. •
Production – Continuity maintains a subservience to a predetermined narrative. Montage, on the other hand, holds that the dialectical collision of images creates a film's meaning, and thus is less concerned with a script than it is the synthesis of associations between shots. •
Effect and Intention – Continuity editing is oriented spatially; meaning it fills gaps between locations and moments in a film's narrative progression. The 180 degree rule, in which an imaginary straight line is imposed by a director in order to create logical association between characters/objects that require a shot-reverse shot, is used to solidify the spectator in a relation to the image in a way that makes visual sense. Montage may include these elements as well, but is not determined by them. Space can be discontinuous in order to disorient a spectator. For example, Dziga Vertov's
Man with a Movie Camera documents the everyday activities of people from various locations in the Soviet Union, but never gives priority to a continuity of action. •
Sergei Eisenstein – Though not the inventor of montage, Eisenstein codified its use in Soviet and international film making and theory. Beginning with his initial work in the
Proletkult, Eisenstein adapted montage to the cinema and expanded his theories throughout his career to encompass the internal nature of the image. He was the most outspoken and ardent advocate of montage as revolutionary form. His work has been divided into two periods. The first is characterised by "mass dramas" in which his focus is on formalizing Marxist political struggle of the proletariat. His films,
Strike and
The Battleship Potemkin among the most noted of the period, centered on the capacity for the masses to revolt. The second period is characterized by a shift to individualized narratives that sprang from a synchronic understanding of montage inspired by his foray into dialectical materialism as a guiding principle. The shift between the two periods is indicative of the evolution of Marxist thinking writ large, culminating in an understanding of the material underpinning of all social and political phenomena. Though largely uncredited by contemporary filmmakers, Eisenstein's theories are constantly demonstrated in films across genres, nations, languages and politics. , in which shot succession changes the interpretation of a facial expression •
The Kuleshov Effect – Lev Kuleshov's work is largely considered the basis from which all montage theory is derived. The Kuleshov Group, composed of Kuleshov and his students, set out to determine the essence of cinema. Rote repetition of the components of the cinema plagued their initial findings: competent acting, provocative lighting and elaborate scenery were not intrinsic to the filmic form. In a study of two films - "an American and a comparable Russian one" - the group identified the American film as extraordinary given the short average shot time. They then inferred that the American organization of shots was perceptually appealing to audiences. Lengthy shots, as seen in the Russian film, make the task of mentally interpreting a pattern difficult. In an essay published in
Vestnik Kinematografii in 1916, Kuleshov first coined the term montage to explain the phenomena of shot succession. In a pinnacle experiment, Kuleshov combined independent shots of Ivan Mosjoukine, a bowl of soup, a baby in a coffin, and a woman on a sofa. The strategic ordering of the shots had a marked effect on audience interpretation of the Mosjoukine's neutral expression. This experiment demonstrated cinema's unique capacity as an art form to conjure specific reactions from the relationship between indexical images. It further demonstrated that montage is dialectical in nature, and that the synthesis of images creates unique political meanings. Recently, Kuleshov's conclusions have been brought into question. In
The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment, Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley contest Kuleshov's findings as unscientific and merely a product of cinematic myth. They conclude that "Kuleshov's effect — understood in terms of shot juxtapositions rather than associational cues — may tell us little about film or visual communication, but its lingering power tells us a lot about the symbolic uses of the past."
Adoption abroad Distance, lack of access, and regulations meant that the formal theory of montage was not widely known until well after its explosion in the Soviet Union. It was only in 1928, for example, that Eisenstein's theories reached Britain in
Close Up. Additionally, filmmakers in Japan during the 1920s were "quite unaware of montage" according to Eisenstein. Despite this, both nations produced films that used something tantamount to continuity editing. According to Chris Robé, the internal strife between Soviet theories of montage mirrored the liberal and radical debates in the West. In his book
Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture, Robé illustrates the Western Left's attempts to tone-down revolutionary language and psychoanalyze characters on the screen.
Hanns Sachs's essays "Kitsch" (1932) and "Film Psychology" (1928) are used here to demonstrate Kitsch's aesthetic distinction from the Realist project of the Soviet Union, and also to affirm Kitsch's ability to create a more powerful affect than realism ever could. As such, Sachs argued, a psychological montage was recognizable in all films, even abstract ones which held no resemblance to classic Soviet cinema. Robé also cites Zygmunt Tonecky's essay "The Preliminary of Art Film" as a reformulation of montage theory in service of abstract cinema. Zygmunt's argument centers around his disagreement with Eisenstein that montage was logical, but rather psychological. As such, abstract films defamiliarize objects and have the potential to create critical spectators. Defamiliarization was seen a catalyst for revolutionary thinking. Clearly, the adoption of Montage Theory was rarely hard and fast, but rather a stepping stone for other theories. The split between the West and Soviet filmmaking became readily apparent with
André Bazin's dismissal of montage and
Cahiers du Cinéma's assertion of the primacy of auteurs. The belief that a still, highly composed, and individuated shot marked cinema's artistic significance was an affront to the dialectical method. That individual directors could compose and produce films by themselves (at least in terms of credit and authorship) made impossible the collectivization of filmmaking. Eisenstein's later work (
Alexander Nevsky [1938] and
Ivan the Terrible [1944–1946]), would undercut his earlier film's appeal to masses by locating the narrative on a single individual.
Contemporary uses The term montage has undergone radical popular redefinition in the last 30 years. It is commonly used to refer to a sequence of short shots used to demonstrate the passage of prolonged time. A famous example is the training sequence in
Rocky (Avildsen 1976) in which weeks of preparation are represented through a sequence of disparate exercise footage. ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off'' (Hughes 1986) demonstrates the same concept in order to collapse several hours into a few short minutes of footage throughout Chicago. This differs entirely from even the most conservative interpretations of montage in the Soviet Union, wherein time is subordinate to the collision of images and their symbolic meaning.
Terms and concepts •
Dialectic – A relationship of conflict that results in a new form. This is taken explicitly and directly from Marx's explanation of the dialectic as the process by which social and political change occurs. There are varying and competing interpretations of how this was to be practiced in Soviet cinema, but the embedding of a dialectical process to montage was an understood goal of most notable Soviet filmmakers. The dialectic traditionally is composed thus: •
Thesis – An initial force, statement, or mode. For film, thesis could be narrative, as in the foregrounded social harmony that is later disrupted; visual, like an opening shot of a sequence; or historical presumption, an economic and political situation which carries particular assumptions about the film's context. •
Antithesis – A conflictual force, statement, or mode designed to negate or otherwise amend the thesis in some way. It is at the point of antithesis that some disagreement occurs. Pudovkin's belief that images build upon one another over the course of the film functions differently than Eisenstein's theory of collision. These two interpretations situate antithesis as either negation (Eisenstein) or addition (Pudovkin). The implication is that the synthetic result is either product (here product is used in the mathematical sense; the multiplication of syntheses) or cumulative, respectively. •
Synthesis – The result of the conflict between the antithesis and thesis, which possess within it the mechanics of its own undoing. Montage was an editorial process whereby new concepts were possible only through the relating of two or more shots, and/or the relationship of elements within a single shot. The affective result might be best demonstrated through the cattle slaughter scene in Strike, in which images of violence inflicted on workers is cut within images of a cow being slaughtered in an abattoir. These images work dialectically to produce revulsion and disgust at the notion of the oppression of the proletariat. •
Stimulants – A formal element whose combination with other elements produces the sum total of montage's effect. Its modifiers "Dominant" and "Secondary" are taken from musical composition theory in which harmonic and melodic resonances are reactions to dominant and secondary notes, chords, beats and time signatures. •
Dominant – The element or stimulus that determines all subsequent and subordinate elements or stimuli. For films that implement Montage Theory, these dominant elements are determined prior to shooting and inform the script and editing process. Not all dominants are singular elements (lighting, allusion, timing, etc.) but can be the product or sum total of all stimulants. For example, in
The General Line, Eisenstein determined dominant stimulants based on the composition of single shots "by the method of 'democratic' equal rights for all the stimulants, viewed together as a complex". This was Eisenstein's attempt to parallel Japanese Kabuki theater, which composed movement in a simultaneously fragmented but hierarchal fashion. More frequently, however, dominants took overt and singular form. In
Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov constructs one sequence- scarcely definable as a "scene"- through the dominant movement of circularity, displaying industrial threading machines and human movements that performed circularly. •
Secondary/Subordinate – The elements or stimuli that support and highlight the dominant. In film, as in music, these create a harmony between and through shots. Without secondary/subordinate stimuli, the internal shot structure lacked the requisite dialectical composition necessary for Socialist Realism's revolutionary form. Eisenstein asserted that competing and complementary secondary stimuli were useful in conjuring particular psychic responses from the audience. Overtonal analysis of sound in
The General Line, for example, reveals that there is an "orchestral counterpoint" to almost every shot, coaxing a texture from the film, rather than a purely visual or aural experience. Unlike Eisenstein, Pudovkin believed that all necessary elements in recognizing a theme must be evident in a single shot rather than a collision of shots. The catch, however, is that the phenomenon chosen to represent a theme should be shot from different angles and perspectives in order to portray the "superficial and the profound interrelationships of actuality". Theme is not, however, a matter of spectatorial interpretation. Rather, it is meant to arrive organically at the conclusion of a given film due exclusively to the control wielded by the director. •
Analysis takes place when a theme is explored from sufficient perspectives. Analysis is derived by examination of individual shots, but is only relevant when synthesized. • Peter Dart, in his description of Pudovkin's concept of analysis, defines it: "An object or an event becomes 'vivid and effective' on the screen only when the necessary details are correctly found and arranged... Pudovkin referred to a hypothetical street demonstration. An actual observer of a demonstration can get only one point of view at a time. To a get a broad view he would have to climb to the roof of a building adjacent to the demonstration, but then he might not be able to read the banners. If he mingled with the crowd he could only see a small portion of the demonstration. A filmmaker, however, can photograph the demonstration from several different points of view and edit the shots to present the spectator with a view of the demonstration, which transforms from a 'spectator' into an 'observer'." •
Identification is the capacity for the audience to fully comprehend the theme of a film. Pudovkin was concerned here with the capacity for spectators to follow his films and hedged against breaks in continuity. As such, identification was mainly concerned with calculating a consistent theme structure and making sure images were seamlessly edited. Pudovkin achieved both of these tasks by "[cutting] on action", or editing shots together through a unified movement. •
Affect, Emotion and Pathos – Often used interchangeably by many Soviet filmmakers and theorists, these are the impressions felt by a(n) audience/spectator from a film or parts of a film. The central problem of Eisenstein's book
Nonindifferent Nature is the relationship between pathos/affect and the method by which art coaxes it. In the chapter
On the Structure of Things, Eisenstein begins with the supposition that represented phenomena depict material elements which explicates a system of structuration between those elements and the phenomena itself. The composition of music is a case-in-point. From the emotional affect of verbalized speech comes the tonal and rhythmic qualities expressed in a given composition. Cinematography generates a similar relational dialectic with images and referents, and through the logic of montage. In short, when one structures the succession of images by its emotional referent, the result is affective moving images. The organic unity of
Battleship Potemkin, for example, sustains particular pathos in particular instances. In the "Odessa Steps" scene, dramatic tension rises not from individuated elements, but the organization of elements (shots, composition, lighting, etc.) from natural model of tension. This model, from which Eisenstein theorizes all forms of organic growth and unity, is that of a logarithmic spiral. This spiral, in which the smaller point corresponds to its larger counterpoint in the same ratio that the larger point corresponds to the figure as whole, explains organic growth within nature, the relations of parts to evolutionary growth, and the process by which transformation takes place. Platonic scholars and art theorists have identified this spiral and formula as a central figure of classical beauty. It can located in classical architecture and painting, as well as contemporary photographic composition (the rule of thirds). For Eisenstein, the capacity for a film (or any art, but specifically "plastic arts") to work affectively/emotionally, organic unity must be achieved, the growth of its constituent parts resembling the logarithmic spiral. When organic unity is realized, one can observe clear pathos. Eisenstein defines pathos as "...what forces the viewer to jump out of his seat. It is what forces him to flee from his place. It is what forces him to clap, to cry out. It is what forces his eyes to gleam with ecstasy before tears of ecstasy appear in them. In word, it is everything that forces the viewer to "be beside himself". In the "Odessa Steps" scene, the collision of contrary movements- e.g. up and down stairs, from many guns to one muzzle- exemplifies an organic growth concept, and is informed by the pathos of the shooting; one of horror. The ex stasis (out of a state) is observed in viewers who trace the logic of organic unity- the compositional and narrative growth of the scene- to its foundational pathos. The affective pay-off is a synthesis of a spectator's experience with the radicalized representations on the screen. • In
The General Line (referred in the text as
The Old and the New) the pathos of the milk separator is localized in order to examine the (in)voluntary contamination of pathos by themes and supposedly neutral elements. Like
Potemkin,
The General Line invoked the theme of "collective unity" within a community. "And all this because the scheme 'of a chain reaction'- buildup of intensity- explosion- leaps from explosion to explosion- gives a clearer structural picture of the leaps from one state to another, characteristic for the ecstasy of particulars accumulating into the pathos of the whole."
Methods •
Attractions – The montage of attractions asserts that an audience is moved emotionally, psychically, and politically by sudden bursts of aggressive movement. Eisenstein adapted this theory from the Proletkult to the cinema in his 1923 essay "The Montage of Attractions". Attractions are a molecular unit of a theatrical whole that is independent of narrative and setting. In his 1924 essay "The Montage of Film Attractions", Eisenstein makes explicit linkage of film and theater through a common audience. Here, an attraction is "...any demonstrable fact (an action, an object, a phenomenon, a conscious combination, and so on) that is known and proven to exercise a definite effect on the attention and emotions of the audience and that, combined with others, possess the characteristics of concentrating the audience's emotions in any direction dictated by the production's purpose." The intent was to ground attractions in revolutionary ideology in order coax the audience into a sympathetic position. •
Metric – where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience. Metric montage was based on the absolute length of shots. The schema of connection is based on the necessity of rapidity. Eisenstein clarifies its implementation by comparing it to beat structures in music, which dictates that structures that fail to follow the "law of prime numbers (relationships)" are incapable of causing any physiological effect. He favors, instead, very basic and simple beat structures (3:4, 2:4, 1:4). • Metric montage example from Eisenstein's
October. •
Rhythmic – Rhythmic montage seeks an editorial and compositional relationship in which movements within frames are as important as lengths of shots. The complexity that was cautioned against for metric montage is praised for rhythmic. Since the content of the shot is a dominant element of the shot length, the ascending or descending meter of the shots makes intuitive visual sense. • Rhythmic montage example from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly where the
protagonist and the two
antagonists face off in a three-way duel • Another rhythmic montage example from
Battleship Potemkins "Odessa steps" sequence. •
Tonal – a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots—not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics—to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation. • Tonal example from Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin. This is the clip following the death of the revolutionary sailor Vakulinchuk, a martyr for sailors and workers. •
Overtonal/Associational – the overtonal montage is the cumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect. • Overtonal example from Pudovkin's
Mother. In this clip, the men are workers walking towards a confrontation at their factory, and later in the movie, the
protagonist uses ice as a means of escape.*
Intellectual – uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.[https://web.archive.org/web/20071110162540/http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/MultimediaStudentProjects/98-99/9505060m/objects/intellectual.htm Intellectual montage seeks to use few images, but images that are rich in cultural, symbolic, and political history. Their collision brings about complex concepts that traditional montage could not achieve. It was at this time (1929) that Eisenstein sought to distance filmmaking from an adherence to positivist realism. Intellectual montage sought to present things not as they were, but as they functioned in society. In his examination of Japanese and Chinese language, Eisenstein determined a linguistic link between language and montage. Hieroglyphs endemic to either country's language were highly contextual. The combination of two characters created concepts, but when separated were neutral. The example Eisenstein gives is the combination of the symbols 'eye' and 'water' produce the concept 'crying'. This logic was extended to Japanese Kabuki theater, which used a montage technique of acting, wherein parts of the body were moved in relation and collision to the whole and other parts of the body. Film, similarly, could collide objects within the frame just as readily as it could between frames. Intellectual montage seeks to capitalize on an internal frame as well as the composition and content of the image itself, without sacrificing a dialectical approach, which Eisenstein ultimately concluded was the downfall of Japanese cinema. Intellectual montage was most notably used as a productive model in Eisenstein's The General Line (1929). Here, dominants- shots and elements within the shot that mark the schema of all adjacent shots and elements- are not foregrounded, but delayed in an attempt to mimic musical resonance. Resonances are secondary stimuli that help to highlight the dominant. It is here that one should note the understandable conflation of overtonal and intellectual montage. In fact, overtonal montage is a kind of intellectual montage, since both attempt to elicit complex ideas from the collision of cinematic stimulants. • Intellectual montage examples from Eisenstein's
October and
Strike. In
Strike, a shot of striking workers being attacked cut with a shot of a bull being slaughtered creates a film metaphor suggesting that the workers are being treated like cattle. This meaning does not exist in the individual shots; it only arises when they are juxtaposed. • At the end of
Apocalypse Now the execution of Colonel Kurtz is juxtaposed with the villagers' ritual slaughter of a water buffalo. •
Vertical montage focuses on the a single shot or moment, rather than across (horizontal) various shots. Indelibly, vertical montage provides a closer reading of images and their content, as well as permits non-visual phenomena to be considered alongside the image proper. •
Moving Camera – A dynamic rather than static camera is often used for the same effect as editing. Though not expressly a form of montage, since editing isn't required, a moving camera can cover movement across space continuously. Dynamic action, in which characters or objects move across protracted distances, was the motivating factor in choosing to move the camera. Peter Dart identifies relatively few uses of a moving camera in his analysis of Pudovkin's
Mother (1926),
The End of St. Petersburg (1928),
Storm Over Asia (1928), and Eisenstein's
Battleship Potemkin (1925). In all of these films and scenes, the moving camera captures movement. One reason for so few moving shots was that it provided undue continuity and forfeited the discontinuity demanded by the dialectical method of montage. Moving camera and mise en scene culminates in what we call the "Inner Montage". •
Audio/Visual – The synaesthetic mode, characterised by a total sensory analysis of film, transforms montage from a purely visual category to one incorporating visual and audio elements. This theory's foundation can be seen in Eisenstein's essay "The Fourth Dimension in Cinema", in which Japanese Kabuki Theater and Haiku are examined as in their fragmented totality. Leonard C. Pronko connects Eisenstein's sensory analysis to a formalized synaesthesia. The implication was threefold. First, this grounded montage theory within a non-western language, which gave credibility to Montage Theory as a universal principle. Second, as Steve Odin illustrates, it provided an opening for Japanese art and culture to be examined within a modern context. Lastly, the integration of other senses into the theory of montage laid the groundwork for Montage Theory's persistence throughout historical and technological changes in cinema. == Intellectual montage ==