Montage (Film Editing)

Montage is a film editing technique that builds meaning by juxtaposing separate shots against one another, so that the relationship the editing creates between images, rather than the content of any single shot alone, carries a scene's meaning or emotional effect. The technique was theorized most influentially by Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, above all Sergei Eisenstein, who argued that editing was cinema's defining art and identified several distinct ways shots could be juxtaposed, by their rhythm, their tone, or the ideas they evoked when placed together, to build meaning the individual shots did not carry on their own. Beyond this specific Soviet theoretical origin, the term is also used more loosely for any sequence that compresses time or information by rapidly cutting between a series of shots, such as a training or travel sequence within a narrative film.