The Chronicle of Editing (III): The Montage System

Among the montage school, there are three very important figures: 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 established 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 decided to use film as a medium for mass communication. However, the film producers and technicians before this were capitalists, and most of them were either expelled by the Bolshevik government or refused to cooperate.

At that time, the film sector was extremely short of both talent and resources. The few remaining resources were integrated into a single film committee. Under the guidance of Lenin’s wife, they founded a film school in 1919 to train new filmmakers: the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, VGIK, which became the first film school in the world.

The school’s main objective was to train new filmmakers to produce films supporting the Bolsheviks, such as newsreels and party propaganda films for educating the masses. But the school was not merely a mouthpiece of the government. Some of the teachers, driven by radical avant‑garde ideas, tried to continue exploring film theory. One of the co‑founders, Lev Kuleshov, brought new insights into the psychological operations of cinema.

The leadership of the film school felt that Kuleshov, then only in his twenties, might not be suited to conventional classroom teaching, so they allowed him to form his own study group outside the regular school structure. This group, called the Kuleshov Workshop, attracted more radical students who sought innovation. But as mentioned, the biggest problem the school faced was the extreme scarcity of film stock. They had to put actual filmmaking aside and turn their focus to film research instead.

In May 1919, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was screened publicly in Moscow. Lenin loved the film, because its conveyed proletarian consciousness was highly incendiary, and he ordered it to be shown throughout the Soviet Union. Against this background, Intolerance naturally became the sample text that the Kuleshov Workshop studied in depth. They dissected Griffith’s editing structure, deconstructed the shots in hundreds of ways, and reassembled them to study how different edits created different effects.

In 1922, thanks to a Soviet‑German trade agreement, film stock began to be imported from Germany. With new stock available, Kuleshov finally had the opportunity to shoot, leading to the far‑reaching Kuleshov experiment.

The same close‑up of a man’s face, when combined with different shots, made his originally expressionless face evoke different feelings in the audience. It turned out that the combination of shots could evoke emotion.

Another experiment: Kuleshov shot three shots—a close‑up of an actor smiling, a close‑up of a revolver, and a close‑up of an actor who looks very frightened. Edited together in the “normal” order, they form a very ordinary scene:

But if the two expression shots are reversed, the character’s personality, in the eyes of the audience, becomes brave.

Although other filmmakers, such as D. W. Griffith, had already instinctively used this technique in practice, Kuleshov was the first to theorize it: cinematic meaning lies not only in space and reality, but also in the arrangement of elements within the image. To further advance this research, Kuleshov used “creative geography” to support this idea: by cutting together footage shot in completely different locations, one could create a believable but non‑existent fictional geography. This was completely different from Western continuity editing, which attempted to hide the joins and achieve smooth, invisible transitions.

Kuleshov believed that film could transcend space, that viewers would actively construct time and space while watching. A film is not born when the camera starts rolling, but truly comes into being through montage and editing.

At this point, the term “montage” was formally introduced by Kuleshov. It comes from the French word monter, meaning to assemble or to splice.

Later, Kuleshov’s student Sergei Eisenstein further refined montage theory.

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

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

Battleship Potemkin is Eisenstein’s most influential work; it directly shaped narrative trends for nearly a century afterward. Filmed in 1925 as part of the 20th anniversary commemoration of the 1905 anti‑Tsarist revolution, it took ten weeks to shoot. The most famous Odessa Steps sequence alone took a week, and the entire film was edited in two weeks, comprising 1,346 shots.

Eisenstein, a devout Marxist‑Leninist, emphasized “conflict” and “collision” in his concept of montage. He believed montage is a process of accumulating “conflicts,” one that essentially conforms to the basic principles of Marxist dialectics: when one shot collides with another, a new idea or theme is produced. This new idea becomes a new thesis, which then collides with an antithesis in another shot to produce a new synthesis, and so on in a continuous cycle of creation, like a constantly running internal combustion engine that ultimately powers the film.

He believed contradictions between opposing ideas (thesis and antithesis) could be resolved by a higher truth—synthesis. He saw conflict as the basis of all art, the only driver of progress and development, and noted that montage had never been ignored in other cultures either. For example, he regarded montage as the guiding principle in the construction of Japanese pictograms, where two independent logographs (“shots”) are juxtaposed and decomposed into a single concept. Hence:

Eye + Water = Crying

Door + Ear = Eavesdropping

Child + Mouth = Screaming

Mouth + Dog = Barking

Mouth + Bird = Singing

He also found montage in Japanese haiku, as in the following example:

A single 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 is a purely physical method of cutting shots according to their length, regardless of the content within the frame. It is purely a technique and a mode of expression, used to provoke basic emotional responses and artificially create rhythm or emotional fluctuations.

• Rhythmic Montage

Built on metric montage, this method takes shot content into account. Although rhythm is artificially created, the editing must respect on‑screen movement, time, and other indicators. Put more simply, this is what people commonly refer to as “creating rhythm.” The distinction from metric montage lies in rhythmic montage’s focus on the shot content itself, using it to reasonably shape the rhythm.

• Tonal Montage

This type of montage is relatively complex. Note that some materials now translate this as “sound‑tone montage,” which is imprecise. “Tone” here refers not only to sound, but to color tone, light and shade, and other non‑temporal factors. The first two types of montage focus on the length of shots, while tonal montage has nothing to do with time; it is tied to the basic “tone” of the shot. Elements such as lighting, shadows, and composition can all determine the cut point—editing between shots of different aesthetic tones.

• Overtonal (Associational) Montage

This is a broader montage method encompassing all of the above. The essence of overtonal montage lies no longer in the clash between individual shots, but between groups of shots—between sequences.

• Intellectual Montage

This type of montage requires the creator’s imagination to express abstract ideas. For example, in Battleship Potemkin, the cross‑cutting between the priest striking the cross and the officer striking his sword hilt conveys the message of corruption linking church and state. Another example is the final sequence on the Odessa steps: the three successive shots of stone lions, representing the gradual awakening and rise of the proletariat.

Eisenstein then applied these five montage methods in his next major work October. The film is filled with a vast number of montage images and represents the culmination of his theories. But, like Griffith later in his career, Eisenstein “pushed it too far.” October is a large‑scale experimental film that left audiences cold. Its wild editing made it hard to understand. Although it contains even more abstract expressions of intellectual montage, it is not as firmly rooted in a strong narrative framework as Battleship Potemkin. Put plainly, intellectual montage requires a powerful narrative as a carrier, to be used at the end to elevate the material. When a film is wall‑to‑wall display of such techniques, audiences inevitably struggle to make sense of it.

As a result, André Bazin criticized him: “The dialectical thinking of montage is too totalitarian and manipulates the audience. This is not cinema; it is a tool for brainwashing. Cinema is about genuine emotion, while montage relies on fabricated time and space and other deceptive means to control viewers.” This opposition between long takes and montage persists to this day.

Later, another of Kuleshov’s students, Pudovkin, continued to refine Eisenstein’s montage theory.

Compared with the “madman” Eisenstein, Pudovkin believed cinema should return to reality and to the script itself—using montage to elevate a relatively mature story.

If Eisenstein’s montage principles are about doing “multiplication,”
then Pudovkin is only doing “addition,” stopping at the right point.

Pudovkin believed: montage is not the entirety of film creation, but merely one of the means of organizing cinematic action to express certain ideas. For example, working from Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, Pudovkin proposed “associational montage,” and he set limits to its scope: “This technique can generally only be used in parts of a film; it cannot be used to unify all the shots.” This is clearly more reasonable, though it naturally drew Eisenstein’s opposition.

From today’s perspective, Pudovkin’s theory is more practical, because all his research is integrated with basic dramatic creation and script theory. He defines montage structurally, rather than making a film that is nothing but montage, as Eisenstein often did.

He insisted on a linear creative method: incorporating the contrast, conflict, and metaphor of montage while also maintaining a complete storyline and a unified structural thread. His depictions of character psychology reached a very high level of artistic refinement; in this respect he was undoubtedly clearer‑headed than Eisenstein.

His 1926 film Mother is unquestionably the work that best represents Pudovkin’s style.

“In my early film Mother, I tried not to use the psychological performance of actors, but instead to move the audience through composite images created by editing. There is a scene in the film: the son is in prison when he suddenly receives a secretly passed note telling him that he will regain his freedom the next day. The question is: how do we express his joy cinematically? If we simply shoot a face radiant with happiness, it will inevitably be flat and may not move the audience. So I showed the excited movements of his hands, and used a big close‑up of the lower half of his face—the smiling corners of his mouth. After these shots, I cut in other material: a stream swollen with spring water; a water surface sparkling in the sun; waterfowl playing in a village pond; and finally a laughing child. Once these elements are cut together, the joy we wished to express is concretely conveyed.”

Today, montage has become an indispensable part of filmmaking, but we must clearly understand that montage is not the entirety of cinema, nor of editing. Eisenstein’s contribution is undeniable, as he proposed a system entirely opposed to Griffith’s. Yet in the end, Pudovkin’s theory is more solid and practical. Put simply, montage must still be rooted in traditional narrative systems; it is merely a means of adding the finishing touch to a story.

By this point, the two major theoretical systems of editing had fully taken shape. One is the continuity editing system developed by Griffith, aimed at telling stories as simply and clearly as possible. The other is the montage system championed by Eisenstein, which uses shots to create new meanings and new configurations of time and space. To this day, all film editing systems still fall within these two frameworks. After montage theory was discovered and consolidated, later filmmakers continued to apply and expand it in their own works—such as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock—fueling the vigorous development of world cinema for a long time. But by the late 1950s, a group of people in France began to stir. Dissatisfied with the dogmatic constraints created by Americans, they sought to revolutionize the language of editing. This group was the French New Wave, whose emergence arguably pushed editing technique to its limits.