Montage is film editing technique juxtaposing images to create meaning beyond each individual shot.
Montage (French: 'assembly') in cinema refers to the technique of editing shots in sequence to generate meaning that is greater than or different from each individual image. Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s — Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Pudovkin — developed montage theory as the central aesthetic of cinema. Eisenstein's concept of 'collision montage' held that juxtaposing two images creates a concept that exists in neither image alone (the Kuleshov Effect, demonstrated by intercutting the same actor's neutral face with different objects to produce apparently different emotions). His Battleship Potemkin (1925) remains the definitive demonstration. In contemporary cinema, montage refers both to this theoretical tradition and more generally to any sequence of images assembled for cumulative effect — the training montage, the time-lapse montage, the historical survey montage. Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, working under Lev Kuleshov's experimental influence, developed montage into a full theoretical system built on the idea that a shot's meaning is determined less by its own content than by its juxtaposition with the shots around it — the famous 'Kuleshov effect' demonstrated that audiences read identical footage of an actor's neutral expression as hunger, grief or desire purely based on what image preceded it. Sergei Eisenstein extended this into 'intellectual montage,' colliding unrelated images — most famously a stone lion statue shown in three successive poses to create the illusion of the lion 'rising' in outrage, in 'Battleship Potemkin' (1925) — arguing that editing could generate ideas and emotional meaning no single shot could produce alone, functioning almost like a visual argument built from conflicting fragments. Hollywood adapted the technique into a more commercial, accessible form: the 'montage sequence' compressing time (a boxer's training regimen, a couple falling in love over a season) became a standard narrative shorthand by the 1930s, stripped of Eisenstein's ideological ambition but retaining his core insight that editing can compress and generate meaning that continuous real-time filming cannot. Modern editing — from music videos to trailers to social media's rapid-cut visual language — remains fundamentally downstream of the Soviet montage theorists' original claim that meaning lives in the cut itself, not only in what is captured on either side of it.