Montage Editing

In class, the week before last, we learned about and discussed the editing technique called montage. This class covered the different interpretations of montage that exist in cinema today.

The Soviets idea of montage was a number/series of shots placed together consecutively. A perfect example of this would be Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. The Odessa Step sequence illustrates exactly what a montage is according to the Soviet Montage Theory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec

Whereas, there's also the "Hollywood Montage". This is the classic montage that nearly everyone knows. The classic Hollywood montage comprises of a series of shots put together that condense the passing of time. The perfect paradigm of this sort of montage would be the training montage in the very first Rocky movie. In this scene, we see time pass as Rocky trains hard and becomes fit enough to take on the fight that occurs at the end of the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP3MFBzMH2o

However, in class we learned the general idea of what a montage is and should be on screen. A montage is a composition made by compiling a bunch of pictures or images together. A montage is a relatively quick sequence of many different shots placed together in a film.

We also learned that a montage should:

It should flow in a continous motion.
It should vary in rhythm and different camera angles.
It should be two more things edited together to create a third called the Tertium Quid. Which should make the whole greater than the sum of the other parts.