Soviet montage theory

A theory of film editing developed by Soviet filmmakers that treats the collision and ordering of shots as a source of meaning and emotion.

Kuleshov effect: An editing effect in which viewers infer different meanings from the same shot when it is paired with different surrounding shots. It demonstrates how a shot’s meaning can change through its relation to adjacent images.
Lev Kuleshov: A Soviet filmmaker and teacher whose experiments helped establish editing as a determinant of cinematic meaning. His teaching and experiments helped make montage a subject of systematic study.
Battleship Potemkin: A 1925 Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein, depicting a mutiny aboard a Russian battleship and a massacre in Odessa. Its Odessa Steps sequence is a celebrated demonstration of expressive editing.
Pudovkin's theory of montage: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s account of editing as the constructive linking of shots into a coherent sequence. It contrasts with Eisenstein’s emphasis on conflict between shots as the source of meaning.
Intellectual montage: A form of montage that juxtaposes images to express an abstract idea rather than a continuous action. It is Eisenstein’s most explicit use of shot collision to produce conceptual meaning.
Sergei Eisenstein: A Soviet film director and theorist known for developing theories of montage and directing films including Battleship Potemkin. He gave montage its most influential theoretical account, especially through the idea of collision.
Strike: A 1925 Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein about a workers’ strike and its violent suppression. Its final sequence juxtaposes the killing of workers with images of slaughtered cattle.
André Bazin: A French film critic and theorist who argued for cinema’s capacity to preserve ambiguity through spatial continuity and long takes. His defense of continuity and long takes challenges montage’s manipulation of meaning through cutting.
Metric montage: An editing method that organizes shots according to their measured length, independent of their content. It shows how duration and cutting rhythm can shape a sequence’s effect.
Vsevolod Pudovkin: A Soviet film director and theorist who described editing as a process of linking shots into a coherent whole. His account of montage as linkage clarifies a key debate with Eisenstein’s collision model.

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