Montage

CORE DEFINITION

Montage (French: Montage), also known as montage sequence (montage-séquence), is originally a transliteration of a foreign architectural term, meaning composition and assembly. It now refers primarily to a film editing technique and is one of the main narrative and expressive methods in film creation. Montage differs from the long take method of film expression; it combines a series of short shots taken at different locations, distances, angles, and methods to edit them into a film with a plot. Through the effect of montage, film enjoys great freedom in time and space, and can even construct film time and space that are inconsistent with real-life time and space. Montage can produce a 'third action' beyond the actions of actors and camera movements, thereby influencing the rhythm and narrative style of the film. Besides film, montage is also widely used in derivative fields such as visual arts. Common montage techniques include newsreel and railway. In the former, such as in 'Citizen Kane', there are many shots of printed newspapers (shots of layers of paper moving between rollers, paper coming out of the end of the printing press, and shots of printing workers looking at newspapers), with headlines enlarged on the screen to tell us what we need to know.