Montage Theory

The formation of montage theory

Montage theory is one of the central strands of early film theory, taking shape alongside cinema itself in the early twentieth century. Within it, montage is not merely the technical operation of joining fragments of image and sound but a principle that organizes screen space, time, and action, participates in producing meaning, and structures the perception of a work.

Continuity editing and montage both treat editing as the driving formal element of narrative filmmaking, but they differ in production, effect, and intention. Continuity serves a predetermined narrative. Montage holds that the dialectical collision of images creates a film's meaning and is therefore less concerned with a script than with the synthesis of associations between shots. Where continuity is oriented spatially, filling gaps between places and moments, montage may make space discontinuous in order to disorient the spectator, as in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, which documents everyday life across the Soviet Union without ever giving priority to a continuity of action.

The theory developed through the practice and writing of directors for whom editing was cinema's key expressive means, including David Wark Griffith, Lev Kuleshov, Béla Balázs, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov.

Although Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s disagreed about how exactly to view montage, Eisenstein marked a note of accord when he wrote that montage is "the nerve of cinema". Its influence is far reaching commercially, academically, and politically. Several Soviet filmmakers, among them Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, and Vsevolod Pudovkin, put forward explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, but Eisenstein's view that "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots", in which "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other", has become the most widely accepted.

Experiment and the parting of theories

Kuleshov's group set out to determine the essence of cinema. Comparing an American film with a comparable Russian one, they found the American film extraordinary for its short average shot time and inferred that the American organization of shots was perceptually appealing. In his best-known experiment, Kuleshov alternated a single shot of the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin's expressionless face with shots of a bowl of soup, a baby in a coffin, and a woman on a sofa; audiences believed the face changed each time, though it was exactly the same shot.

The experiment's epistemic standing is nonetheless unsettled. Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley have contested Kuleshov's conclusions as unscientific and as a product of cinematic myth, and when, where, and how the experiment was made is not precisely known: no film or photo documentation is known to survive. Kuleshov and his collaborator Pudovkin told differing versions beginning soon after the work was done, and before the 1960s the phenomenon was sometimes called the Pudovkin effect. Subsequent psychological studies have nevertheless found that the context in which a face is shown significantly affects how it is perceived.

Eisenstein codified the use of montage in Soviet and international filmmaking. Beginning with his initial work in the Proletkult, he adapted montage to cinema and expanded his theories throughout his career. His 1923 manifesto "Montage of Attractions", published in the journal LEF, proposed a theatrical method in which freely chosen, independent "attractions" are assembled with a precise aim at a final thematic effect, giving the spectator an intellectual and emotional jolt. He classified five modes of film montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual, the last of which expresses abstract ideas by creating conceptual relations opposed to the visual content.

His work is divided into two periods: mass dramas on the capacity of the masses to revolt, including Strike and Battleship Potemkin, followed by a shift to individualized narratives influenced by his foray into dialectical materialism. That shift points to the emergence of the cinematic language later associated with socialist realism.

Institutional conditions and the end of the school

The growth of the montage school cannot be separated from its institutional conditions. After the revolutions the Soviet government could not afford large-scale film production, and between 1918 and 1922 filmmakers faced a chronic shortage of cameras and film stock, which were not manufactured in Russia. The decree nationalizing the film industry that Vladimir Lenin signed on 27 August 1919 transferred the whole photographic and cinematographic trade and industry, including the supply and distribution of technical means and materials, to the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros), headed in part by Nadezhda Krupskaya and Anatoly Lunacharsky. Lunacharsky's enthusiasm for cinema later became a factor favourable to the young artists of the montage school; two directors who would shape Soviet cinema in the 1920s, Kuleshov and Vertov, entered it under Narkompros in 1918.

Vertov, who from 1920 filmed newsreels for Narkompros, formulated the theory of the "kino-eye", according to which the camera lens was an infallible means of perceiving the world. Kino-Eye forged a film and newsreel collective that sought the dismantling of bourgeois notions of artistry above the needs of the people, holding that labor, movement, the machinery of life, and the everyday of Soviet citizens should coalesce in the content, form, and productive character of its repertoire. Films that focused on individuals rather than masses were deemed counterrevolutionary, and the collectivization of filmmaking was central to the programmatic realization of the Communist state.

The movement was formally an avant-garde current, and its adherents were recognized for innovation and artistic experiment, though it was not the dominant tendency of Soviet cinema and its influence was most visible in Europe. The school ended as the Soviet authorities gradually introduced the aesthetics of socialist realism; Eisenstein's later work, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944-1946), undercut his earlier appeal to the masses by locating the narrative on a single individual.

Opposition and later reassessment

The theory met strong opposition. Andrei Tarkovsky rejected the principle of montage of attractions, holding that a film expresses the essence of the world and that the decisive element in cinema is cinematic rhythm as movement within the film's structure rather than the temporal sequence of shots. The split became readily apparent with André Bazin's dismissal of montage and Cahiers du Cinéma's assertion of the primacy of auteurs.

Montage theory persisted in later film thinking. Tarkovsky's "Sculpting in Time" (1967) set out the opposing position, while Gilles Deleuze revisited the theory in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Jean-Luc Godard and Artavazd Peleshyan reworked it, and post-Soviet film theories relied extensively on montage's redirection of film analysis toward language, a literal grammar of film. In popular usage the term montage now commonly refers to a sequence of short shots demonstrating the passage of time, which differs entirely from even the most conservative Soviet interpretations, wherein time is subordinate to the collision of images and their symbolic meaning.