Montage is the European term for putting together the shots of a film, whereas the American term is “cutting” or “editing”. Montage suggests that a film is constructed rather than edited (Monaco, 2013).
Montage is used in a number different ways. While maintaining its basic meaning, it also has the more specific usages of:
- A dialectical process that creates a third meaning out of the original two meanings of the adjacent shots; and
- A process in which a number of short shots are woven together to communicate a great deal of information in short time
Montage literally translated from French is assembly, the process by which an editor takes two pieces of film of tape and combines them to emphasise their meaning (Azia, 2015). Visualise, for example, shot A which is a pumpkin and shot B which is a hammer going down. Mix both shots together and you get a meaning, C. By placing the two shots together, the pumpkin is assumed to be destroyed by the hammer.
Sergei Eisenstein is an important individual within the world of editing because he developed “The Film Sense” with fast editing and juxtaposition. The school of thought at the time was that shots complemented each other; if you showed a person walking, then the next shot should help continue the action. Eisenstein developed the idea of juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is the process of showing two things which are unrelated and through combining, they create a new meaning.
References:
Monaco, J. (2013), How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 239-49.
Azia, R. (2015), Montage theory, [online] available from < http://www.main-vision.com/richard/montage.shtml > [Last accessed 13/4/2015]
nhancdang 