Editing Chronicles (III): The Montage System

When discussing the montage school, there are three extremely 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 founded the Soviet Socialist Republic. This country of 160 million people had long been torn apart by years of civil war, so the ruling party’s primary task was to consolidate public support. They chose film as a mass medium of communication. However, the filmmakers and technicians before this were capitalists; most of them were expelled by or stopped cooperating with the Bolshevik government.

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

The school’s main goal was to train new filmmakers to support the Bolsheviks, for example by producing newsreels and propaganda films to educate and influence the masses. But the school was not just a mouthpiece for the government. Some teachers held radical avant‑garde ideas and tried to further study film theory. One of the school’s co‑founders, Lev Kuleshov, would bring new insights into the psychology of how films operate.

The school’s leadership felt that Kuleshov, who was only in his early twenties, might not be up to traditional “teaching” work, so they allowed him to form his own study group outside the formal structure of the school. This group was called the Kuleshov Workshop and attracted more radical, innovation‑minded students. But as mentioned, the biggest problem the school faced was the extreme scarcity of film resources. They could only temporarily set aside actual film production and instead turn toward researching film itself.

In May 1919, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was shown in Moscow. Lenin was extremely fond of this work because its expression of proletarian consciousness was highly incendiary, and he ordered it to be screened across the Soviet Union. Against this background, Intolerance naturally became a key object of study for the Kuleshov Workshop. They dissected Griffith’s editing structure, deconstructed the shots in hundreds of ways and recombined them to study how different editing patterns produced different effects.

In 1922, influenced by the Soviet‑German Trade Agreement, film stock began to be imported from Germany, and new stock became available. Kuleshov finally had the opportunity to shoot and then launched his far‑reaching Kuleshov Experiment.

A close‑up of the same man was combined with different shots; the originally expressionless close‑up seemed to convey different feelings to 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 the actor looking frightened. Linked in normal order, this formed a very ordinary scene:

But if the two expression shots were reversed, the character’s personality would be perceived by the audience as brave.

Although other filmmakers like D. W. Griffith had already instinctively used this technique in practice, Kuleshov was the first to theorize it: the meaning of film lies not only in space and reality, but also in the way elements are arranged within the image. To further this research, Kuleshov used “creative geography” to support this idea—by splicing together two segments shot in completely different locations, one could create a fictional geography that didn’t exist in real life but felt believable. This was completely different from the Western continuity editing that came before, which tried to hide the seams and achieve a smooth, invisible transition.

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

At this point, Kuleshov formally introduced the term “montage,” from the French monter, originally meaning to assemble or 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.

While Griffith approached editing from events to create a language of continuity and heighten emotional impact, Eisenstein viewed film from a more emotional, sensorial perspective, breaking time and space to convey abstract ideas in a more modern way.

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

A devoted Marxist‑Leninist, Eisenstein’s concept of montage emphasizes “conflict” and “collision.” He believed montage is a process of constant accumulation through conflict—a process that essentially accords with 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 another antithetical shot, creating yet another synthesized idea. In this way, through ceaseless cycles of creation—like a constantly running internal combustion engine—montage ultimately fuels the film.

He believed that contradictions between opposing ideas (thesis and antithesis) could be resolved through a higher truth: synthesis. He saw conflict as the basis of all art; only conflict drives things forward. He also noted that montage had never been ignored in other cultures. For example, he viewed montage as the guiding principle in the construction of Japanese pictograms, where two independent ideograms (“shots”) are juxtaposed and decomposed into a concept. Thus:

Eye + water = crying

Door + ear = eavesdropping

Child + mouth = scream

Mouth + dog = bark

Mouth + bird = sing.

He also discovered montage in Japanese haiku, as in the following:

A lonely raven
On a bare branch
An autumn night.

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

• Metric montage

This method is the purely physical cutting of shots according to length, regardless of the content within the shot. It is purely a means and form of expression, provoking basic emotional responses by artificially creating rhythm or mood shifts.

• Rhythmic montage

Built upon metric montage, this method takes the content of the shot into account. Although the rhythm is artificially constructed, the editing is guided by the movement and timing within the shot. Put more simply, this is what people usually mean by “creating rhythm.” Unlike metric montage, rhythmic montage emphasizes the shot’s content and creates rhythm appropriately based on that content.

• Tonal montage

This kind of montage is relatively complex. Note that some materials now translate this as “sound‑tone montage,” which is imprecise. Here, “tonal” refers not only to sound but also color tone, light, and other factors beyond time. The first two types focus on the duration of shots; tonal montage has nothing to do with time and is instead about the basic tone of the shot. Elements such as lighting, shadow, and composition determine the points at which cuts occur, switching between shots with different aesthetic tones.

• Overtonal montage

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

• Intellectual montage

This sort of montage requires the creator’s imagination, used to express abstract ideas. For example, in Battleship Potemkin, the cross‑cutting between a priest pounding a cross and an officer pounding a sword hilt conveys the idea of collusion between a corrupt Church and State. Another example is the final sequence on the Odessa Steps, with 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 great work, October. The film is filled with a large number of montage images and is the culmination of Eisenstein’s theoretical system. But as with Griffith’s later work, Eisenstein somewhat “went off the rails.” October is a large‑scale experimental film that ultimately left audiences cold; its wild editing made it hard to understand. Although it contains more abstract expressions of intellectual montage, it is not as firmly rooted in a powerful narrative framework as Battleship Potemkin. To put it bluntly, the method of intellectual montage requires a strong narrative as its vehicle and should be used only at key moments for thematic elevation. A film that shows off this technique from beginning to end inevitably becomes difficult for audiences to comprehend.

Thus he invited criticism from André Bazin: “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, whereas montage clearly relies on constructing time and space and other falsifications to control the viewer.” This opposition between long take and montage continues to this day.

Later, Kuleshov’s other student, Pudovkin, continued to refine Eisenstein’s montage theory.

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

If Eisenstein’s principle of montage was doing “multiplication,” then Pudovkin was merely doing “addition,” applying it sparingly.

Pudovkin believed: montage is not the entirety of film creation but merely one method of organizing cinematic action to express a certain idea or intention. For example, starting from Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, Pudovkin proposed “associative montage” and at the same time circumscribed its scope: “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 naturally drew Eisenstein’s opposition.

From today’s perspective, Pudovkin’s theory is more practical, because all of his research is integrated with basic dramatic creation and script‑related theory, defining montage structurally rather than, like Eisenstein, shooting films made entirely of montage.

He adhered to linear storytelling: there is contrast, conflict, and metaphor from montage, but also complete storylines and unified structural threads. In particular, his psychological and character portrayals reached a high level of artistry; in this respect he was definitely clearer‑headed than Eisenstein.

The 1926 film Mother is undoubtedly the work that best represents Pudovkin’s style.

“In my early film Mother, I once tried to dispense with actors’ psychological performance and instead move the audience through composite imagery constructed by editing. There is a scene in the film: the son is sitting in prison when he suddenly receives a secretly passed note telling him that the next day he will be free. The question is how to express his joy cinematically. If we simply photographed a face radiant with joy, it would be flat and probably not moving. 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 corners of his mouth. After these shots I added other material: a stream swollen with spring water; a water surface glittering in the sun; water birds playing in a village pond; and finally a laughing child. Once these materials were connected, the ‘joy of the young man’ we wanted to show was vividly expressed.”

In contemporary cinema, montage has become an indispensable component, but we must be clear: montage is not the whole of film, nor the whole of editing. Eisenstein’s contribution is indelible because he proposed a system completely opposed to Griffith’s, but 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 to embellish the story.

By this point, the two major editing systems had fully taken shape: one is the continuity editing system developed by Griffith to tell stories as simply as possible; the other is the montage system promoted by Eisenstein, which uses shots to create new meanings and build new time‑spaces. To this day, all film editing systems remain within these two frameworks. After montage theory was established and consolidated, later filmmakers continued to apply and expand it in their own work—people like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock—and this drove the flourishing of world cinema for a long time. But by the late 1950s, a group in France began to stir restlessly. Dissatisfied with the dogmatic constraints of the American‑invented systems, they tried to revolutionize the language of editing. This group was the French New Wave, whose emergence can be said to have pushed editing technique to its limits.