From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel

Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing (montage is French for "putting together"). Although Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s disagreed about how exactly to view montage, Sergei Eisenstein marked a note of accord in "A Dialectic Approach to Film Form" when he noted that montage is "the nerve of cinema," and that "to determine the nature of montage is to s

olve the specific problem of cinema."

While many Soviet filmmakers, such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin put forth explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, Eisenstein's view that "montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots" wherein "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other" has become most widely accepted.

See also

• Sergei Eisenstein
• Lev Kuleshov and the Kuleshov Effect
• Vsevolod Pudovkin
• Dziga Vertov
• La Psychologie de l'Art — book on montage theory by André Malraux
• Imagism
• Pound's Ideogrammic Method
• Cubism