Editing Chronicles (III): The Montage System

When it comes to the montage school, there are three extremely important representatives: Lev Kuleshov and his two students Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

At the end of World War I, Russia descended into chaos. In 1917, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin overthrew the Tsar and established the Soviet Socialist Republic. But this nation of 160 million people had already been torn apart by years of civil war. The ruling party’s primary task was to consolidate public support, so they chose film as a mass medium of communication. However, the producers and technicians who made films up to that point were capitalists; 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 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 objective was to train new filmmakers to produce films in support of the Bolsheviks—for example, newsreels and political propaganda films to educate the masses. But the school was not merely a mouthpiece for the government. Some of the teachers held radical avant‑garde ideas and tried to push film theory further. One of the school’s co‑founders, Lev Kuleshov, would bring new insights into how film works psychologically.

The school leadership at the time felt that Kuleshov, then in his twenties, was not quite suited to a traditional “teaching and nurturing” role, so they allowed him to form his own study group outside the school’s formal structure. This group, known as the Kuleshov Workshop, attracted more radical and innovative students. Yet, as mentioned earlier, the school’s biggest problem was the extreme scarcity of film stock. They had to set aside actual filmmaking and turn their focus toward researching film itself.

In May 1919, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance was screened publicly in Moscow. Lenin was extremely fond of the film because its conveyed proletarian consciousness was highly incendiary, and he ordered it to be screened throughout the Soviet Union. Against this backdrop, Intolerance naturally became a prime research sample for the Kuleshov Workshop. They dissected Griffith’s editing structures, breaking down shots in hundreds of ways and rearranging them to study how different editing patterns produced different effects.

In 1922, due to the Soviet‑German trade agreement, film stock started to arrive from Germany, and new stock became available. Kuleshov finally had the chance to shoot, leading to the profoundly influential Kuleshov experiments.

A close‑up of the same man’s face was alternately combined with different shots. The originally expressionless close‑up seemed to evoke different feelings in the audience depending on what it was paired with. It turned out that the combination of shots could invoke emotion.

In another experiment, Kuleshov shot three images: a close‑up of an actor smiling, a close‑up of a revolver, and a close‑up of the actor looking frightened. Edited together in the “normal” order, you got an entirely ordinary scene:

But if the two facial expression shots were reversed, the character’s personality in the audience’s eyes became brave.

Although other filmmakers such as D. W. Griffith had already used this technique intuitively in practice, Kuleshov was the first to theorize it: film’s meaning lies not only in space and reality, but also in how elements within the frame are arranged. To further advance his research, Kuleshov used “creative geography” to support this idea: by splicing together shots filmed in completely different locations, one could create a fictional geography that did not exist in real life but was still convincing. This differed fundamentally from Western continuity editing, which tried to hide the seams and achieve smooth, invisible transitions.

Kuleshov believed that film could transcend space, that audiences actively construct time and space while watching. Film is not born when the camera starts rolling; it is truly brought into being through montage and editing.

It was at this time that Kuleshov formally introduced the term “montage,” from the French verb 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 filmmaking by structuring events and developing continuity editing to increase emotional impact, Eisenstein took a more emotional and conceptual approach. He broke through time and space to convey abstract ideas in a more modern way.

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

A staunch Marxist‑Leninist, Eisenstein emphasized “conflict” and “collision” in his notion of montage. He believed montage is a process of accumulating “conflicts,” a process that essentially follows the core principles of Marxist dialectics. When one shot collides with another, a new idea or theme emerges. This new idea then becomes a new thesis, which collides with an antithetical shot to create yet another synthesized idea. And so the cycle continues, generating ideas like a constantly running internal combustion engine that ultimately powers the film.

He believed that contradictions between opposing ideas (thesis and antithesis) can be resolved through a higher truth: synthesis. For him, conflict was the foundation of all art; only through conflict could things move forward and develop. He also pointed out that montage had never been ignored in other cultures. For example, he saw montage as the guiding principle behind constructing Japanese pictograms, where two independent logographs (“shots”) are juxtaposed and fused into a concept. Thus:

Eye + water = crying

Door + ear = eavesdropping

Child + mouth = scream

Mouth + dog = bark

Mouth + bird = sing

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 types of montage to explain how to create collisions between shots:

• Metric montage

This method is a purely physical cutting of shots according to their length, without regard for their content. It is purely a device and expressive form, used to elicit a basic emotional response and artificially generate rhythm or emotional fluctuation.

• Rhythmic montage

Built on metric montage but taking into account shot content. While rhythm is still consciously constructed, editing must respond reasonably to actions, timing, and other indicators within the shot. Put more simply, this is the common idea of “creating rhythm.” It differs from metric montage in that rhythmic montage pays more attention to shot content itself and builds rhythm according to that content.

• Tonal montage

This method is relatively complex. Note that some materials translate this as “audio” montage, which is imprecise. “Tone” here refers not only to pitch, but also to color tone, light and shadow, and other non‑temporal factors. The first two types of montage focus on the duration of shots, whereas tonal montage is unrelated to time; it’s about the basic tone of the shot. Lighting, shadows, and composition can all determine editing points, and cutting occurs between shots with different aesthetic tones.

• Overtonal montage

This is a more comprehensive montage method that incorporates all of the above. The essence of overtonal montage is no longer conflict 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 a priest banging on a cross and an officer striking his sword hilt conveys the idea of corruption linking Church and State. Another example is the final sequence on the Odessa Steps: three successive shots of stone lions symbolizing the gradual awakening and rise of the proletariat.

Eisenstein then built his next major work, October, around these five montage theories. The film is loaded with montage imagery and is the culmination of Eisenstein’s theoretical system. But like Griffith in his later years, Eisenstein somewhat “overdid it.” October is a massive experimental film that ultimately left audiences cold. Its wild editing made it hard to understand. Though it contains more abstract expressions of intellectual montage, it lacks the strong narrative framework that grounded Battleship Potemkin. In other words, the method of intellectual montage needs a powerful narrative as its carrier, to be used at the end for thematic elevation. Using it as pure stylistic display throughout inevitably makes the film inaccessible.

This drew criticism from André Bazin: “The dialectical thinking of montage is too totalitarian and manipulative of the audience. This is not cinema; it is a tool for brainwashing. Cinema is about genuine emotion, whereas montage clearly relies on creating time and space—fabricating and deceiving—to control the audience.” This opposition between long takes and montage persists to this day.

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

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

If Eisenstein’s montage was about doing “multiplication,” then Pudovkin’s was doing “addition”—enough to make its point, then stop.

Pudovkin argued: montage is not the entirety of film creation, but merely one of the means of organizing screen action to express a specific idea. For example, building on Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, Pudovkin proposed “associational montage,” while limiting its scope: “This device can generally only be used in parts of a film; it cannot be used to unify the whole.” This is clearly more reasonable, though it obviously met with Eisenstein’s opposition.

From today’s perspective, Pudovkin’s theories are more practical, because his research always tied montage to basic dramatic creation and screenwriting theory, defining montage structurally rather than, like Eisenstein, making an entire film out of montage.

He insisted on creating along a narrative line: there is contrast, conflict, and metaphor through montage, but also a complete storyline and unified structural thread. He brought the psychological and character depiction of his figures to a high level of artistic sophistication; in this respect, he was definitely more clear‑headed than Eisenstein.

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

“In my early film Mother I tried not to use the actor’s psychological performance, but to move the audience by means of composite images created through editing. There is a scene in the film: the son is in prison when he suddenly receives a secretly passed note telling him he will regain his freedom the next day. The question is: how can his joy be expressed cinematically? If we simply show a face beaming with happiness, it will probably be flat and unconvincing. So I showed the excited movements of his hands, used big close‑ups of the lower half of his face—the smile at the corners of his mouth—and then cut to other material after these shots: a stream swollen with spring water; a sun‑dazzled water surface; waterbirds playing in a village pond; and finally a laughing child. Once all this material was assembled, the joy we wanted to express was vividly conveyed.”

Today, montage has become an indispensable element of film, but we must understand that montage is not the whole of cinema, nor the whole of editing. Eisenstein’s contribution is indelible because he proposed a theoretical system completely opposed to Griffith’s. Yet in the end it is Pudovkin’s theory that is more solid and practical. Put simply, montage must still be rooted in traditional narrative systems; it is a means of embellishing and enriching the story.

By this point, the two major systems of editing theory were fully formed. One is the continuity editing system developed by Griffith, designed to narrate stories as simply and clearly as possible. The other is the montage system promoted by Eisenstein, which creates new meanings and constructs new space‑time through shot combinations. To this day, no film editing system has truly escaped these two frameworks. After montage theory was established and consolidated, later filmmakers continued to apply and expand it in their works—people like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock—driving the flourishing of world cinema for a long time. But by the late 1950s, a group in France began to stir. Dissatisfied with the dogmatic constraints of the American‑invented systems, they sought to revolutionize editing language. This group was the French New Wave, whose emergence arguably pushed editing technique to its limits.