What Is Montagem? Meaning and Origin of the Brazilian Music Genre

At its core, montage (derived from the French word monter, meaning “to assemble” or “to mount”) is the art and technique of editing film or video clips together to create a unified whole, convey a deeper meaning, or compress time.

Far beyond simply gluing scenes together in chronological order, montage treats film editing as an intellectual and emotional tool. When two distinct shots are placed side-by-side, our brains naturally forge a connection between them, creating a third, completely new meaning that neither shot possessed on its own.

The Evolution: From Editing to Ideology

While editing existed from the dawn of cinema, the concept of montage was revolutionized in the 1920s by Soviet filmmakers and theorists like Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein.

• The Kuleshov Effect: Lev Kuleshov famously demonstrated that viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. In his experiment, identical footage of an actor’s neutral face was edited next to three different things: a bowl of soup, a dead woman in a coffin, and a playing child. Audiences praised the actor’s subtle expressions of hunger, grief, and joy—even though his face never changed.
• Eisenstein’s Collision of Shots: Sergei Eisenstein took this a step further, arguing that montage should not be a seamless bridge, but a collision. By crashing conflicting images, scales, or rhythms together, filmmakers could provoke specific intellectual, political, and emotional responses from the audience.

The Main Types of Montage

Over the decades, montage has expanded across different artistic disciplines and cinematic styles:

1. The Classical Hollywood Montage (Time Compression):
   Famously used in sports films, heist movies, and coming-of-age stories (think of the training sequence in Rocky), this style uses a rapid series of short clips accompanied by music to show a passage of time, character progression, or a grueling training regimen in minutes.
2. Soviet / Intellectual Montage:
   The collision of disparate images to spark abstract ideas or political commentary (