Montage
A compressed sequence of short shots, usually scored. The training scene, the city wakes up, the relationship in 90 seconds.
- COINED
- 1920s
- TAXONOMY
- EDITING
- RELATED
- 4
- TEMPLATES
- 0
A montage is a compressed sequence of short shots, usually scored. Training scenes. City-wakes-up sequences. The week-in-the-life. Years of a relationship in 90 seconds. The montage is how cinema cheats time - and the audience loves being cheated this way.
Two schools share the name. The Soviet school (Eisenstein, Vertov) used montage to collide ideas: two unrelated shots intercut to manufacture a third meaning in the viewer's head. The Hollywood school used it to compress narrative time. Both are alive and well.
A good montage is a story in miniature: setup, escalation, payoff. A bad montage is just a slideshow with music. Pick three or four beats that tell a small arc and cut around them. Don't try to show everything that happened - pick the moments that imply the rest.
Time compression. Training arcs. Tone setting in opening sequences. Emotional summaries between major plot beats.
When you're avoiding writing the scene properly. As filler. When music isn't licensed or scored to it.
Terms next to this one.
Two scenes intercut to imply simultaneity. The chase / the bomb / the rescue.
Drop the audience into action before titles. Saturday Night Live made it a verb.
Many short clips of the same thing strung together. YouTube native.
Many tiny clips of different sources cut together to suggest a single mood or theme.