Task Five - Understanding Montage Theory

A Montage is the technique of selecting, editing and piecing together separate sections of a film or short clip and putting them together to create a continuous whole. There are three main forms of Montage; The French Montage, Hollywood Style Montage and a Soviet Montage.

A French Montage literally means to 'assemble' a film or clip. Therefore, in French Film the term simply identifies the process of editing. A Hollywood Montage is when the film maker picks out the most important/main clips of something and then condense them into a short sequence that shows all these clips. Doing this creates different aspects and condenses a long narrative sequence into a shorter one. Finally, a Soviet Montage is when the film maker juxtaposes different shots that didn't exist in either shot alone to create a new, deeper meaning. Usually the two different shots contrast with each other but bring the film together to reveal the hidden meaning.

Two key film makers who were famous for their montages are Les Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein. Les Kuleshov is famous for the Kuleshov Experiment which is when he used the same image of a man and compared it to three other random pictures.

Lev Kuleshov

Kuleshov Experiment

A Hollywood Montage is when you make a short film which shows all the most important parts of a certain thing, such as a day. A famous example is the training scene from Rocky. In this clip we see Rocky training but instead of filming the whole thing we are only shown the most important parts of the day. As the audience we can see it is a whole day as the clip starts of with Rocky running in the morning, and then by the end of the clip we can see from the background light that it is the evening/end of the day. 

Sergei Eisenstein is also an important filmmaker as he introduced us to the Soviet Montage. Sergei's first feature length film was called Strike in which he shows a video of the suppression of the strikers and then cross-cuts it to shots of cattle being slaughtered. The idea of this was to show the audience the way in which these strikers were treated.