Editing Chronicles (III): The Montage System

Regarding the montage school, there are three very important representatives: Lev Kuleshov and his two students, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

At the end of World War I, Russia fell into chaos. In 1917, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin overthrew the Tsar and founded the Soviet Socialist Republic. But this country of 160 million people had already been torn apart by years of civil war. The ruling party’s primary task was to consolidate popular support, so they chose film as a mass communication medium. However, prior to this, film producers and technicians were all capitalists, most of whom were expelled by or refused to cooperate with the Bolshevik government.

At this time, the film sector was extremely short of both talent and resources. What little remained was consolidated into a single film committee. Under the guidance of Lenin’s wife, in 1919 they established a film school to train new filmmakers: the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, VGIK, which also became the world’s first film school.

The school’s main goal was to train new filmmakers to produce films supporting the Bolsheviks, such as newsreels and party propaganda films to educate the masses. But the school was not only a mouthpiece for the government. Some of its teachers held radical avant‑garde ideas and tried to continue researching film theory. One of the co‑founders, Lev Kuleshov, would bring new insights into the psychological workings of film.

The school’s leadership felt that the twenty‑something Kuleshov was not entirely suited to traditional “teaching” work, so they allowed him to form his own study group outside the school’s formal structure. This group, called the Kuleshov Workshop, attracted more radical, innovation‑minded students. But as mentioned, the biggest problem was the extreme scarcity of film stock. They had to temporarily set aside actual filmmaking and turn instead to studying film.

In May 1919, Griffith’s Intolerance was screened in Moscow. Lenin was extremely fond of the film because its proletarian consciousness was highly incendiary, and he ordered it to be shown throughout the Soviet Union. In this context, Intolerance naturally became a key research sample for the Kuleshov Workshop. They dissected Griffith’s editing structure, deconstructing shots in hundreds of ways and recombining them to study how different edits produced different effects.

In 1922, due to the Soviet‑German Trade Agreement, film stock began to be imported from Germany. With new stock available, Kuleshov now had the opportunity to shoot, and soon launched the far‑reaching Kuleshov Experiment.

The same close‑up of a man’s face, when combined with different other shots, made the originally expressionless close‑up seem to convey different feelings to the audience. In other words, the combination of shots could evoke emotion.

Another experiment: Kuleshov shot three images—a close‑up of an actor smiling, a close‑up of a revolver, and a close‑up of an actor who looks terrified. Connected in a normal order, this makes a very ordinary scene:

But if you reverse the two facial expression shots, the character’s personality in the eyes of the audience becomes courageous.

Although other filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith had already instinctively used this technique in practice, Kuleshov was the first to theorize it: film’s meaning lies not only in space and reality, but also in the way things are arranged within the image. To further advance this idea, Kuleshov used “creative geography” to support it. By splicing together shots filmed in completely different locations, one could create fictional yet believable geographies that do not exist in real life. This was entirely different from the earlier Western system of continuity editing, which tried to hide cuts and achieve seamless, invisible transitions.

Kuleshov believed that film could transcend space; when watching a film, viewers actively construct time and space. Film is not born when the camera starts rolling; it is truly born in montage and editing.

It was at this time that the term “montage” was formally introduced by Kuleshov. It comes from the French monter, meaning to assemble or to splice.

Later, the theory of montage was further developed by Kuleshov’s student Eisenstein.

Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith are widely recognized in film history as two pioneering geniuses.

While Griffith started from events to create a language of continuity editing and enhance emotional impact, Eisenstein approached cinema more emotionally, breaking time and space to convey abstract ideas in a more modern way.

Battleship Potemkin is Eisenstein’s most influential work and directly shaped nearly a century of narrative development afterward. It was shot in 1925 as part of the twentieth‑anniversary commemoration of the 1905 anti‑Tsarist revolution. Filming took ten weeks; the famous Odessa Steps sequence alone took one week, and the entire film was edited in two weeks. It contains 1,346 shots.

Eisenstein, a staunch Marxist‑Leninist, emphasized “conflict” and “collision” in his montage concepts. He believed montage is a process of continual accumulation through “conflict,” a process that essentially accords with the basic principles of Marxist dialectics. When one shot collides with another shot, a new idea or theme emerges. This new idea then becomes a new thesis, which in turn collides with another antithetical shot, producing yet another synthesis. In this way, the process repeats—like a constantly working internal combustion engine—ultimately providing energy to the film.

He believed contradictions between opposing ideas (thesis and antithesis) could be resolved through a higher truth—synthesis. For him, conflict is the foundation of all art; only conflict drives things forward. Montage had never been ignored in other cultures either. For example, he regarded montage as the guiding principle behind constructing Japanese pictograms, where two independent logograms (“shots”) are juxtaposed and deconstructed into a single concept. Thus:

Eye + water = crying

Door + ear = eavesdropping

Child + mouth = scream

Mouth + dog = bark

Mouth + bird = sing.

He also found montage in Japanese haiku, such as:

A lonely crow
On a bare branch
An autumn evening.

Based on his theoretical research, Eisenstein proposed five methods of montage to explain how to create collisions between shots:

• Metric montage

This type of montage cuts shots purely based on their physical length, regardless of what they show. It is purely a formal device that can trigger basic emotional responses by artificially creating rhythm or emotional fluctuations.

• Rhythmic montage

Built on metric montage but attentive to shot content. Although rhythm is still artificially created, shots are cut according to indicators such as movement and time within the frame. Put simply, this is what people commonly mean by “creating rhythm.” The difference from metric montage is that rhythmic montage pays more attention to the content of the shots themselves and creates rhythm based on that content.

• Tonal montage

This type of montage is relatively complex. Note that some materials now translate this as “sound” montage, which is imprecise. Here, “tonal” refers not only to sound but also to color tone, lighting tone, and other factors besides time. The first two types focus on the selection of shot duration; tonal montage is unrelated to time and instead concerned with the basic tone of the shot—for example, lighting, shadows, and composition can all determine the cutting points. It switches between shots with different aesthetic tones.

• Overtonal montage

This is a more expansive method of montage that encompasses all the above forms. The essence of overtonal montage is no longer the conflict between individual shots, but between groups of shots—between sequences.

• Intellectual montage

This form of montage requires the creator’s imagination to express abstract ideas. For instance, in Battleship Potemkin, the cross‑cutting between a priest banging a crucifix and officers striking sword hilts conveys the idea of collusion and corruption between church and state. Another example is the final sequence on the Odessa Steps—the three successive shots of the stone lion, symbolizing the gradual awakening and rise of the proletariat.

Eisenstein then applied these five montage theories to his next major work, October. Loaded with dense montage imagery, the film is a grand synthesis of his theories. But like Griffith in his later period, Eisenstein somewhat “overdid it.” October is a large‑scale experimental film that ultimately met with audience indifference. Its wild editing made it hard to understand. Though it features even more abstract intellectual montage than Battleship Potemkin, it is not as deeply rooted in a powerful narrative framework. Put bluntly, intellectual montage needs a strong story as a carrier and should be used for final elevation. Displaying this technique throughout an entire film makes it hard for audiences to grasp.

Thus came André Bazin’s criticism: “The dialectic of montage is too totalitarian and manipulates the audience. This is not cinema; it is an instrument of brainwashing. Cinema demands genuine emotion, while montage clearly relies on creating artificial time and space—on fakery—to control viewers.” This opposition between long takes and montage continues to this day.

Later, another of Kuleshov’s students, Pudovkin, carried on refining Eisenstein’s montage theory.

Compared with the “madman” Eisenstein, Pudovkin believed cinema should return to reality and to the script itself: on the foundation of a relatively mature story, montage is then used to elevate the work.

If Eisenstein’s montage aims to do “multiplication,”
Pudovkin is merely doing “addition,” stopping at the right point.

Pudovkin held that montage is not the entirety of filmmaking, but only one of the means of organizing film action to express particular ideas. For example, drawing on Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, Pudovkin proposed “associational montage” and at the same time limited the scope of montage: “This technique can generally only be used in parts of a film and cannot be used to unify all the shots.” This is clearly more reasonable, though it obviously drew Eisenstein’s opposition.

From a modern point of view, Pudovkin’s theory is more practical because all his research is integrated with basic dramatic creation and script theory, defining montage structurally, rather than, like Eisenstein, making an entire film out of nothing but montage.

He insisted on a linear creative method: not only contrast, conflict, and metaphor in montage, but also complete storylines and unified structural threads. In particular, his psychological and character work reached a high level of artistry; in this respect, he was definitely more clear‑headed than Eisenstein.

Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother is undoubtedly the best representative of his style.

“In my early film Mother, I tried to move audiences not through actors’ psychological performance, but through composite images created by editing. There is a scene in the film: the son sits in prison and suddenly receives a secretly passed note, from which he learns that he will regain his freedom the next day. The question is how to express his joy cinematically. If I were to simply film a face radiating joy, it would be flat and unlikely to move people. So I showed the excited movements of his hands and used a big close‑up of the lower half of his face—the smile at the corner of his mouth. Then I followed these shots with other material: a brook swollen with spring water; a sun‑dappled surface of the river; waterfowl playing in a small country pond; and finally a laughing child. After connecting these shots, the ‘joy of the young man’ we wanted to express was vividly conveyed.”

In contemporary cinema, montage has become an indispensable part of filmmaking. But we must clearly understand that montage is not the whole of cinema, nor the whole of editing. Eisenstein’s contribution is indelible, as he proposed a complete theoretical system directly opposed to Griffith’s. Yet in the end, Pudovkin’s theory has proven more solid and practical. Put simply, montage must still be rooted in traditional narrative systems; it is only a means of enhancing the story.

At this point, the two theoretical systems of editing had fully formed: one is the continuity editing system developed by Griffith to tell stories as simply and clearly as possible; the other is the montage system promoted by Eisenstein, using shots to create new meanings and new time‑spaces. To this day, all film editing systems fall within these two ranges. After montage theory was discovered and consolidated, later filmmakers continued to apply and develop it in their works—Orson Welles, Hitchcock, and others—fueling the flourishing of world cinema for a long time. But by the late 1950s, a group in France once again grew restless. Dissatisfied with the doctrinal constraints invented by Americans, they sought to revolutionize the language of editing. This group was the French New Wave, whose emergence arguably pushed editing techniques to their limits.