Montage as a meaning-machine (Kuleshov’s lesson): Lev Kuleshov argued that a shot has one value as an image and a second, more powerful value created by its juxtaposition with the next shot, turning editing into the engine of interpretation.[3] This is the core spell of montage: the audience doesn’t just watch cuts, they complete them.
Eisenstein’s collision theory (montage as conflict): Sergei Eisenstein pushed montage beyond continuity and into ideology, designing sequences to produce emotional and political effects through “attractions,” deliberately chosen moments meant to hit the viewer with force and direction.[1] His larger montage framework (metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, intellectual) treats editing as a set of controllable pressures, where shot relationships can generate concepts, not just story beats.[2] Even standard film histories note how his October became a lab for “intellectual” montage, where shot links are conceptual rather than merely visual.[4]
French New Wave rule-breaking (editing as attitude): By 1959–62, New Wave filmmakers treated editing like a public performance, not a hidden craft. Godard’s jump cuts in Breathless weaponize discontinuity: they break “invisible” time-flow on purpose, making you feel the edit as an aesthetic decision.[6][7] Alongside that, films like Hiroshima mon amour and Jules et Jim turn editing into memory and momentum: flashbacks, ellipses, narration, freeze frames, and temporal leaps become the story’s shape, not an ornament.[10][9]