What is a montage expression?

Originally an architectural term, it means combination and assembly. Commonly used in three artistic fields, it can be interpreted as an intentional manual collage and editing technique in time and space. It was first extended to film art, and later widely used in derivative fields such as visual art.

Montage is one of the main narrative and expressive means of film creation, which is different from the expression of long-shot movies. That is, a series of shots taken from different distances and angles in different places. In a broad sense, montage is editing, that is, editing some shots into a movie plot and portraying characters. With the help of montage,

Movies enjoy great freedom in time and space, and can even constitute a movie time and space that is inconsistent with the time and space in real life. Montage can produce "the third action" besides the actor's action and the camera action, thus affecting the rhythm and narrative style of the film.

Eisenstein once emphasized

No matter what two shots are matched together, it will inevitably produce a new look, a new concept and a new image. Through the conflict of lens alignment, new meanings are generated and the audience is guided to think rationally. This is the essence of Eisenstein's "juggling montage" and "intellectual montage". Montage appeals to both narrative emotion and appeal to reason.

Therefore, in Battleship potemkin, Eisenstein cut into three scenes of "the lion swoops down, looks up and leaps up" which have nothing to do with the plot, thus showing the people's awakening and resistance. In October, this tendency to express abstract ideas became more obvious. The collapse of the iron statue of the tsar symbolizes the collapse of the tsar's regime, and inserting the statue of Napoleon is a metaphor for kerensky's dictatorship.