–

“At this point some viper must be hissing: ‘Aha! the old devil is going to gallop about montage again.’

Yes, montage.

For many film-makers montage and leftist excesses of formalism – are synonymous. Yet montage is not this at all.

For those who are able, montage is the most powerful compositional means of telling a story.

For those who do not know about composition, montage is a syntax for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment.

And lastly, montage is simply an elementary rule of film-orthography for those who mistakenly put together pieces of a film as one would mix ready-made recipes for medicine, or pickle cucumbers, or preserve plums, or ferment apples and cranberries together.

Mot only montage … I should like to see the expressive activity of man’s hand freed from these lesser portions of his toilette, away from these supporting aggregates. 

One encounters in films individually fine shots, but under these circumstances the value of the shot and its independent pictorial quality contradict one another. Out of tune with the montage idea and composition, they become esthetic toys and aims in themselves. The better the shots, the closer the film comes to a disconnected assemblage of lovely phrases, a shop-window full of pretty but unrelated products, or an album of post-card views.

I do not stand by any means, for the ‘hegemony’ of montage. The time has passed, when with the aims of pedagogy and training, it was necessary to perform tactical and polemical twists, in order to free montage broadly as an expressive means of cinema. But we must face the question of literacy in film-diction. And we must demand that the quality of montage, of film-syntax and film-speech not only never fall back behind the previous work, but that these go beyond and surpass their predecessors – this is why we should be deeply concerned in the struggle for a high quality of film culture.”

– from Film Language by Sergei Eisenstein, 1934, pp. 111-12 in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory

Image: a still from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin – mutinous sailors sit atop a mast, piled on a crow’s nest and yard; stays cut through the sky around them.