Snip-Snip! A Brief Look at Montage

Rather than the content of the shot, montage sequences in film and the editing of shots alone can constitute the force of a film by using a process in which a series of shots are edited into a string to condense space, time, and information.

As with a number of film techniques, the idea of montage derives from early art and photography in which a combination of images using collage or darkroom editing processes were (and still are) used.

In photography and art, montage was predominantly used by Dada-ists and Surrealists and especially for propaganda and political purposes, signifying meaning through a number of intertwined images.

A display of subliminal images play with our emotions, provoking certain sentiments, as discovered by early Soviet montage pioneers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. You see it for a couple of seconds and then something leaves a ghostly trace from the previous image that enhances meaning into the next one.

Soviet montage technics were developed to improve the propaganda effectiveness of film. Eisenstein communicated political message through montage, focused on the individual character so audience could relate to and empathise with his characters. Looking at Eisenstein's theory, Metric Montage follows a specific number of frames, this is based purely on the physical nature of time, cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image; Rhythmic cuts happen for purpose of continuity or to keep with pace of film; Tonal uses emotional meaning of shots, not just manipulating the length of the cuts or rhythmical characteristics; Overtonal/Associational accumulates metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesise its effect on audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect; Intellectual uses a combination of shots from outside the film in order to create meaning.

Example of Metric: Cut mathematically to mimic pattern of a beat:

An example of tonal and intellectual style montage: Fincher's Se7en:

Dark intro sequence that set the pitch, plot and characterisation for the noir thriller.

The sequence alone gives audience an idea of the killer's inner thoughts. The aim of this montage is to perhaps get audiences curious about the antagonist of the story.