Montage

Kuleshov Effect 

 One of the foundations of film editing and one of the best known effects of cinema is that entitled Kuleshov Effect. Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted a series of experiments in which he made a juxtaposition of plans, thus obtaining a new meaning.

    There is a famous photo of the guy where it shows a single picture of a man and next to him a woman in a coffin which the audience has described him as sad, and then there was the same picture of him but next to a plate of food, the audience has described him as hungry. The last picture was of him  was next to a woman laying down which was described as desire This is one of the most basic effects of cinema, and if this phenomenon did not occur, it would hardly be such a rich and thought-provoking art. The discovery of this principle had several developments, and filmmakers explored it more than others.

Soviet Montage

The practice of editing is one of the most contemporary artistic procedures as a practically obligatory reference and widely absorbed by a multitude of artists from the most diverse expressive fields. People like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein found out how to combine and contrast images to get ideas across, and how the rhythm and pace of editing, and the use of music, could stir emotions.

Eisenstein was the big theorist of montage, writing books like ‘Film Form’, where he looked at how things such as changing the duration of a shot (how long it stayed on screen), using movement in the shot, and its emotional content, would affect audiences.For getting ideas across (‘intellectual montage’) he put images together and contrasted them. In Strike (warning: gruesome footage),  shots of a cow being slaughtered are cut together with shots of workers being killed by troops. In October Christian symbols are mixed in with religious objects from other cultures to suggest that all religions are the same.

Intellectual or dialectical montage

The so-called dialectical or intellectual montage is an operation with a more or less descriptive purpose that consists of bringing plans together in order to communicate an ideological point of view, feeling or content to the viewer. Eisenstein wrote in the justification of his montage of attractions: "Once assembled, two fragments of film of any kind inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, which arises precisely from their juxtaposition.

Montage is the art of expressing or giving meaning through the relationship of two juxtaposed planes, such that this juxtaposition gives rise to the idea or expresses something that does not exist on either plane separately. 

When elements are gathered (in the broad sense) to obtain a result, this is often different from what was expected. For example, in biology that father and mother mix their hereditary heritage to create a third character not by the sum of these two heritages, but rather by combining them into a new unpublished heritage. In chemistry, it is known to be possible to mix two elements in any proportion, but it is not possible to truly combine them into a new body if it does not have perfectly defined proportions (Lavoisier). Likewise, in the making of a movie, plans can only be brought together in a harmonious relationship.

Ideological montage consists in giving reality an intellectually reconstructed view. It is necessary not only to look, but to examine, not only to see, but to conceive, not only to take knowledge, but to understand. Montage is, then, a new method, discovered and cultivated by the seventh art, to clarify and highlight all the connections, exterior or interior, that exist in the reality of various events.

Montage can create or evidence purely intellectual, conceptual relations of symbolic value: relationships of time, place, cause, and sequences. It can draw a parallel between shotgun workers and slaughtered animals, as, for example, in Eisenstein's The Strike (1924). The subtle connections may not reach the viewer. Here is an example of the symbolic parallelism approach between a workers' demonstration in St. Petersburg and a workers' delegation that will ask its boss to sign a set of claims (example taken from the Soviet Mountains' film Golden Mountains by Serge Youtkévitch) .

Associative or tonal montage

There are 5 types of montage, within them there is: The Metric Montage,  The Rhythmic Montage, The Overtonal Montage, The Intellectual Montage and Tonal Montage