The term Montage has different meanings in different cultures. The three I will be talking about are,
- French Film
- Hollywood Cinema
-Early Soviet Filmmaking
Hollywood Cinema
A Hollywood montage is a technique in video editing where you use fragments of clips and put them together in short sequences to express long periods of time and different scenarios. An example below is the film "Rocky" This is where Rocky is unfit and they use the montage technique to make it seem that he has been training over a long period of time. The Hollywood montage often includes a song in the background to express motion and action, while using short but action-packed clips expresses a long period of time, this is an effective method as trying to express a long amount of time in a film can be difficult, which is why the Hollywood montage is used a lot.
Soviet Montage
In early soviet filmmaking, Montage had a different meaning entirely.
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker, who created experiments for his research which was using media and film to see if certain styles of editing could trick and make people think about what was on the screen.
Lev Kuleshov did an experiment in around 1920. He took an odd film clip of a head shot of a noted Russian actor and inter-cut the shot with different images. The effect was that he was show people two different images, one picture included a person with a blank facial expression, and the other picture he could select an image, and your brain would connect them both together, when food was shown in the second picture, the first image of the person looks like he is hungry, so your brain creates the links between the two pictures.
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker, who created experiments for his research which was using media and film to see if certain styles of editing could trick and make people think about what was on the screen.
Lev Kuleshov did an experiment in around 1920. He took an odd film clip of a head shot of a noted Russian actor and inter-cut the shot with different images. The effect was that he was show people two different images, one picture included a person with a blank facial expression, and the other picture he could select an image, and your brain would connect them both together, when food was shown in the second picture, the first image of the person looks like he is hungry, so your brain creates the links between the two pictures.
The Experiment
French Film Montage
The word "montage" in French means Assembly, which means in the French term, it means to identify the process of editing, which means to edit.
Modern Times (Chaplin)
Below is a soviet montage, in this clip it shows factory workers bundled in a large group getting to a destination, then the next clip (no particular order) shows sheep in the similar group bundle also walking towards the camera, the sheer numbers of both clips show a correlation and clearly shows that the workers are shown to be obedient and controlled just like the sheep are, so it shows the humans are blind and just following orders from their superior.
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein was a Russian Soviet Filmmaker who created the Soviet Montage style. He became well known after his well known "Strike" which was his first full-length film which was about workers starting a revolution after a wrongly accused worker committed suicide. The film came out in 1925 and is widely regarded as one of the best films ever made.
Strike used the Russian Montage style by making a lot of workers run away in terror, and making the environment seem tense, then shortly afterwards the next scene involves the slaughtering of a cow. The two scenes carefully placed together, gives the illusion that the cow that is getting slaughtered is referencing the running workers, you see nobody getting killed in the running worker scene, but because of the illusion, it looks like the workers are being murdered by the superiors even though no violence in that scene is happening.
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