Montage in October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927)

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Montage in October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927)
Montage, or merely editing, is a film production style that employs the use of several unrelated images or shots to create a notion of change in time and space. Sergei Eisenstein is generally considered to be the father of this technique due to his popularization of the method in the production of Soviet films. Eisenstein's montage is a product of conflict and collision. According to Eisenstein, montage is in no way created by mere linkages of the shots. He views each shot as a precursor of the entire montage. He considers each shot in a montage as a plant or animal cell. Just like what happens inside the cell - the collision of molecules and cell division - each shot is a beehive of numerous activities that result in one shot. He defends his principle of conflict and clashes through the in-depth analysis of a single shot. One shot in a montage, he says, has its videographics elements of sound, color, and imagery. These building blocks collide in an unorderly manner to give rise to a single shot.
As opposed to the linkage of shots, montage is the creation of an idea or concept. On the one side, the linkage is represented as a weak outcome of the collision and conflict taking place in one shot. On the other hand, montage is the strongest possible outcome of the active mingling of shots. Eisenstein argues that collisions in montage can have an infinite number of outcomes. The shape of these possibilities is dependent on the buil...