Editing and Montage in International Film and Video

1 EDITING AND MONTAGE

Definition and Scope of Practice

 

 

 

Since its inception, montage has been considered the principal tool for constructing audiovisual narratives and activating emotional responses in viewers. Film theorists such as Pudovkin and Eisenstein, who developed Münsterberg’s earlier ideas, created a series of models to intensify and make more effective the filmic experience. A review of the literature on the early years of silent cinema (Eisenstein 1999c; Pudovkin 1988; Bálasz 1978) reveals the refined systematization of self-taught editing techniques used in early US silent films, such as Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Griffith’s Intolerance (1915) and Birth of a Nation (1908). These empirical and intuitive findings ...