Montage
Meaning made between shots, not within them. The editing code at its most assertive.
- editing
- film-language
A sub-concept of the Editing code. Montage is editing used constructively: two shots collide and the viewer manufactures a third meaning neither shot contains. The Kuleshov effect is the lab demonstration; the Soviet theorists (Eisenstein above all) turned it into a grammar.
Working definition for the wiki
Whenever the cut itself is the content — compression of time, manufactured violence, manufactured emotion — file it here.
Canonical case
Psycho — the shower scene, where the violence exists only in the juxtaposition — see The shower scene is built from 78 setups. A gentler case from the same film: the search montage (Playback: the search ↗), 41 seconds of continuity-of-time compression.
Sources
Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art ch. on editing for the taxonomy (graphic, rhythmic, spatial, temporal relations between shots); Truffaut for Hitchcock's own distinction between the shower scene's "pure film" and mere photographed action.