A Montage of Ideas

Sergei Eisenstein may not be a well known name to today's film audiences, but a century ago, he was at the forefront of the new groundbreaking technology called cinema. Filmmakers were just beginning to understand the properties of this new technology in the early part of the 20th century when Eisenstein was beginning his career as a director. The language of film that we take for granted today, composed of different angles and types of shots, was only being discovered then.

Montage comes from a French term, meaning "to build", which in its simplest terms can be applied to film editing of any sort. Typically when we think of montage today, we think of its use in Hollywood films. There are countless examples of sequences set to music showing a series of events, typically used to compress time. There was the classic method of calendar pages flipping superimposed over images of some task being worked on, or a series of newspaper headlines combined with images of the film's hero in action. And we've all seen the sequences in sports themed movies showing a character learning some new skill and seeing all the trials and tribulations of training shown in quick clips, so we can more quickly skip ahead in time to the pinnacle of success.

Eisenstein's view of montage was very different. As he discusses in his essay Montage in 1938, montage gets at the juxtaposition of two or more images and the meaning that results from this juxtaposition. The meaning changes not only for the sequence as a whole, but also for each image through this relationship. he uses the example of a woman weeping beside a grave. If we take each if these images individually, a woman weeping, a grave, the two could have very different connotations. Why is the woman weeping? Whose grave is this? Now place them together in the same shot, or even place the two separate shots next to one another. As Eisenstein suggests, we might readily assume that this woman is a widow and the grave belongs to her husband who has just passed away. We have not added any information, just the context. And by placing the images in a context, we now have a story with a theme and each image is given new meaning.

As we consider themes, we can begin to think about what images come to mind that evoke that theme. This is a sort of reverse process that the audience will go through as they watch the film. If you give them the images in the right order, they will naturally arrive at the same thematic concerns and meaning that you started with. Consider filming a war scene. What elements will go into making that scene read to the audience as a war scene? Soldiers, explosions, guns, tanks, planes, the wounded laying dead, etc. Now as you begin to find an angle and develop characters within that framework, a story emerges.

The earliest examples of montage as viewed by Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein as well as his contemporaries Lev Kuleshov and Vsevolod Pudovkin was more radical than this. In their view, it was through the process of bringing together disparate elements that some greater meaning could be derived. Their interest was mainly in the capability of film to create a powerful visual metaphor. As filmmaking evolved, so did ideas about how to effectively communicate narrative, and it came to be seen primarily as a tool for telling a story. Whether it is intercutting closeups of a particular detail that the audience should see, such as a character's partially concealed gun, or perhaps intercutting between two different scenes to connect or contrast what is happening thematically, theories of montage are still very relevant in modern cinema.

Beyond the theoretical discussion of what montage is or is not, Eisenstein spells it out more simply. In terms of acting technique, the actor must access something within themselves based upon some experience they had in their life in order to accurately represent the role onscreen. In turn, montage accesses within the audience of a film that same sort of emotional response in reverse. People relate to what they see in a film based upon their own life experience. It's our job as filmmakers to strike the right chords in order to achieve the desired response.