Montage

Montage comes from the French word for assembly 'montage' hence the phrase "assembly edit". In French film making montage has a literal meaning and simply identifies editing, in soviet film making of the 1920's montage was a method of juxtaposing shots together to derive new meaning that did not exist in either shot by them selves, and in classic Hollywood film making montage sequences are shot segments in a film in which narrative information is presented in a condensed way.

Hollywood montage is a montage style that became a convention during the classical Hollywood era and has remained a very popular technique for directors and editors throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century. the montage sequence consists of a series of short shots that are edited into a sequence to condense narrative, it is usually used to advance the story as a whole rather then create symbolic meaning.

Soviet montage leans more toward creating symbolic meaning, Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet film maker and film theorist, one of the founders of the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School. for Kuleshov editing a film was like the construction of a building- brick by brick, shot by shot. Kuleshov conducted an experiment where he edited together a short film in which the expressionless face of Ivan Mosjoukine was altered with various other shots. soviet montage works because it is the audience that infer meaning based on what they see and the context provided.