Magical History Tour – Montage

Montage belongs to the most important and essential stylistic tools in cinema. Montage structures space and time, it can create continuities and breaks and have a dynamizing and rhythmic effect. Soviet avant-garde filmmakers already recognized and tested the effectiveness of montage at an early stage. The famous Kuleschov effect, for instance, (in which the stock-still face of a man is intercut with different scenes and thus triggers different emotions), proves the suggestive power of montage. But the cinematic language that became seminal and has shaped our viewing habits until today was developed in Hollywood: a montage evoking a flowing continuity of movements. By means of cuts that are as "invisible" as possible, the impression of a light, effortlessly flowing narration is given. Already in the 1910s, D.W. Griffith employed the most important principles of montage in his outstanding films Birth of a Nation and INTOLERANCE. Griffith had an important influence on Russian theorists and filmmakers such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin, even if they developed a contrasting theory and practice. Russian avant-garde cinema stresses not the organic assemblage but oppositions and contrasts. Dialectical montage consisting of contrary and associative shots has a jolting effect on the spectator. The juxtaposition of two shots results in a totally new unit of meaning.