Montage editing is a style of film editing which, speaking generally, use the act of editing as a central artistic tool of film as opposed to a mere technical procedure to link different shots. In the practice of Sergei Eisenstein and his contemporaries, montage is primarily concerned with the idea that editing two or more shots together can affect the audience’s thinking on the relevant shots, creating a new idea whose impact goes beyond that of the two shots considered separately. The easiest way to demonstrate this idea is by examining the Kuleshov Effect. Named for Soviet filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov (who also founded the Moscow Film School, the world’s first dedicated film school), the Kuleshov Effect is an idea born from an editing experiment conducted by Kuleshov himself. In the experiment, Kuleshov showed audiences three pairs of shots. The first shot depicts a scene (A bowl of soup, a dead girl in an open casket, or an attractive women lying in a seductive pose) and the second shot is always a close up of Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine’s face. The shot of Mosjoukine was always the same exact footage, but Kuleshov found that audiences believed each shot of Mosjoukine was different, reading different emotions in his face corresponding to the previous shot (hunger for the soup, grief for the dead girl, and lust for the attractive woman). Kuleshov and his Soviet contemporaries interpreted these results as proof that audiences’ interpretations of shots could be manipulated by editing. (Footage from the original experiment can be seen here.)
The Kuleshov Effect is a simple example of what is called "intellectual montage," a specific application of montage editing to produce thematic meanings which could not have been divined through either of the individual shots. Perhaps the most famous example of this technique in Soviet film can be found in the final scene of Eisenstein’s Strike (1925). In this scene, striking factory workers are chased into a fenced-in field and gunned down by the army. Eisenstein intersperses shots of this event with shots of a cow being slaughtered by butchers. From the combination of these shots, we are meant to understand that the strikers have been designated for slaughter by the army just as the cow was, and that by extension the Tsarist regime views these workers as no better than animals. The scene in question can be watched here (content warning: contains graphic footage of a real-life cow being killed). Another example can be found in Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928), when Eisenstein juxtaposes the images of Tsarist palaces with religious symbols of various cultures throughout history. In the connection of these images, Eisenstein advances the Marxist idea that religion frequently functions as a tool of oppression for corrupt power structures.
Other methods of montage style include (but are not limited to) rhythmic montage (an editing style based on dramatic timing best exemplified by Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa Steps scene), discontinuity (manipulating the time and space of a scene to disorient the audience or for some other thematic purpose), and audio-visual montage, after the advent of sound film. Some filmmakers took the style to extremes that even Eisenstein could not envision. Dziga Vertov became known for documentaries which eschewed traditional narrative entirely, using editing to weave together disparate events into abstract thematic and aesthetic meanings. Though full-on montage style is not generally used anymore, examples of its techniques can be found in most modern films.
