Sergei Eisenstein's Montage

A detailed Summary of Sergei Eisenstein's Montage

Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage involves the combining of fragmental shots of film into intellectual series and contexts. How the fragments combine and are formed is the essence of his notion of montage by conflict. This theory challenges traditional narrative movies because it involves taking an idea and recombining broken fragments in an incongruent way to produce new ideas, and occasional shocks. As a result, montage reflects more on community because it requires a wider range of images and ideas to communicate a broader concept. Traditional narrative movies reflect more on the individual because they require more of the same type images.

The concept of how film narration communicates depends entirely on the structure or ordering of the sequence. Eisenstein structures the sequences of shots abruptly whereas traditional narrative movies rely mostly on the smooth flowing of shots of scenes to tell a story. Traditional narratives

take fragments combining them as sequences only to link or compress time while Eisenstein's theory of montage takes the idea of discontinuity and recombines images with boundless time and space. This theory was rooted to the Japanese representational culture: "From separate hieroglyphs has been fused--the ideogram." The ideas set upon recombining these fragments create a sense of conflict in and of itself, and create the juxtaposition of shots that produce new concepts, thus narrating the story. Traditionally however, a narrative is situated by a chronological, orderly set of shots. For example, in the Crop Duster Sequence in North by Northwest, a story is told linearly by first introducing the setting to the audience by a long shot of the openness of the crop fields. Then a point of view shot in the eyes of the Star showing a car passing by. The sequence continues back to the Star with an anticipated-turned-disappointed gesture, then

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Approximate Word count = 635
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Arts

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Sergei Eisenstein's Montage

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