Montage & Meaning

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]

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

• Revolution: Turned editing into a tool for collective emotion, using montage to shape how viewers feel and judge events.[2][5]
• Technique: Soviet montage principles, where meaning emerges from shot-to-shot relationships rather than smooth continuity.[2][5]
• One scene to study: The Odessa Steps sequence, built from escalating fragments (crowd, soldiers, panic) to create a psychological stampede of cause-and-effect.[2][5]
• Why it changed everything: It made “cutting” feel like thinking, proving that edits can manufacture tension and ideas, not just connect actions.[2][5]
• Production fact: Eisenstein’s theories of montage methods (including “intellectual” montage) are closely associated with the strategies showcased across his silent films, especially the way shots are compiled for specific effects.[2]

October (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928)

• Revolution: Used cinema as a conceptual argument, treating editing as a laboratory for political meaning.[4]
• Technique: “Intellectual” (or “ideological”) montage, where shot relationships are conceptual rather than purely visual or emotional.[4]
• One scene to study: Any sequence where symbols and images are linked to form an abstract idea (watch for how the cut itself “asserts” the concept).[4]
• Why it changed everything: It formalized the notion that editing can produce abstraction, turning film into a machine for ideology and metaphor.[4]
• Production fact: Major film histories explicitly describe October as Eisenstein’s experiment ground for intellectual montage, and note it drew criticism for “formalist excess” in its time.[4]

Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

• Revolution: Made modern memory-editing mainstream art cinema: the past doesn’t “arrive” politely, it interrupts.[10]
• Technique: Elliptical time shifts and memory structures, where flashbacks and montage operate like psychological triggers rather than tidy exposition.[10]
• One scene to study: The opening/prologue, which interweaves intimacy with documentary and devastation imagery to launch the film’s argument about personal and collective memory.[10]
• Why it changed everything: It retooled narrative time, showing how editing can mimic the mind: associative, fractured, obsessive.[10]
• Production fact: David Bordwell notes Resnais described the script’s structure in terms of “parallel editing” linking wartime France and contemporary Japan, reframing how the film “cuts” between worlds.[11]

Breathless (À bout de souffle) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

• Revolution: Made discontinuity fashionable and philosophical, yanking viewers out of passive absorption with edits that refuse to “behave.”[6][7]
• Technique: Jump cuts that deliberately disrupt temporal continuity, breaking the smooth “invisible editing” tradition.[6][7]
• One scene to study: The in-car passages and street movement where time suddenly skips forward inside a scene; watch how momentum becomes jagged and alive.[6][7]
• Why it changed everything: It turned editing into attitude: the film isn’t pretending to be seamless reality, it’s showing you the author’s hand.[6][7]
• Production fact: The film is famously associated with radical jump-cut editing as a defining feature of its style and impact, frequently highlighted in major critical contexts.[6][8]

Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962)

• Revolution: Proved “lyrical speed” could be narrative: editing becomes the emotional pulse of a relationship over time.[9]
• Technique: New Wave editing signatures including jump cuts and freeze frames used as expressive punctuation.[9]
• One scene to study: Any freeze-frame moment that halts the story mid-breath; watch how the pause changes your relationship to the characters as “icons” in motion.[9]
• Why it changed everything: It fused formal play (cuts, freezes, narration energy) with intimacy, making experimentation feel human instead of abstract.[9]
• Production fact: Britannica specifically calls out the film’s use of jump cuts and freeze frames as integral to the film’s 1960s style and offbeat texture.[9]