Editing II: montage, rhythm and alternatives to continuity

Continuity editing aims to be invisible. But editing can also be visible, expressive and argumentative. Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s treated the cut as a collision that could create new ideas. The French New Wave broke continuity rules to jolt viewers. Other filmmakers have reduced editing almost to nothing, letting long takes unfold in real time. This lesson covers montage in its several senses, the measurement and meaning of rhythm, jump cuts and discontinuity, and the long take. It also introduces average shot length, a simple statistic that lets you compare editing styles across films and eras.

The Kuleshov effect

In the years after the Russian Revolution, young Soviet filmmakers studied editing intensively, partly because film stock was scarce and they re-edited existing footage. Lev Kuleshov is credited with experiments showing that viewers interpret a shot according to the shots around it. In the best-known version, the same expressionless close-up of an actor was intercut with different images, such as a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin and a woman on a couch, and viewers reportedly praised the actor's expression of hunger, grief or desire. Historians debate exactly what was filmed, and later experiments have found the effect is real but more modest than legend suggests. The core idea endures: meaning arises from the relation between shots, not only from each shot alone.

Soviet montage

Sergei Eisenstein, the best-known Soviet theorist and director, argued that editing should create conflict between shots, a collision of images that would produce an idea or emotion in the viewer's mind that neither shot contained alone. He described several kinds of montage, including metric (based on shot length), rhythmic (based on movement within shots) and intellectual montage, which joins images to create abstract concepts. In his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, the famous Odessa Steps sequence uses rapid, conflicting shots of soldiers marching, citizens fleeing and a runaway baby carriage to express the brutality of a massacre, stretching screen time far beyond the real duration of the events.

Other meanings of montage

The word montage is used in several ways, which can confuse beginners.

• In French and in much European usage, montage simply means editing.
• In Soviet film theory, montage means editing that creates meaning through the collision or juxtaposition of shots.
• In Hollywood usage, a montage sequence is a short passage that compresses time or summarizes a process, often set to music: a training montage, a falling-in-love montage, a newspaper-headlines montage. These sequences rely on dissolves, wipes or rapid cuts rather than continuity.

When you use the word, make clear which sense you mean.

Rhythm and shot length

Rhythm comes from the duration of shots, the pattern of those durations, and the movement within shots. Short shots create speed, energy or anxiety; long shots create calm, contemplation or dread. Editors also vary rhythm within a scene, accelerating toward a climax and slowing afterwards. Rhythm interacts with music, dialogue and sound effects; cutting on the beat of a song makes a sequence feel driven by the music.

One simple way to describe an editing style is average shot length (ASL), the mean duration of the shots in a film or sequence. Film historians such as Barry Salt and David Bordwell have used ASL to track changes in style. They found that average shot lengths in Hollywood films fell markedly over the second half of the twentieth century: many studio-era films averaged something like eight to eleven seconds per shot, while many films of the 2000s averaged around four seconds or less. Bordwell calls the modern approach intensified continuity: faster cutting, more close-ups and more camera movement, but still following continuity principles.

ASL is a blunt tool. An average can hide huge variation: a film with a few very long takes and many quick cuts might have the same ASL as one with uniform medium-length shots. Some researchers therefore also report the median shot length. Use ASL as a starting point for comparison, not a full description.

Jump cuts and discontinuity

A jump cut is a cut between two shots of the same subject from nearly the same camera position, so that the subject appears to jump abruptly within the frame or time appears to skip. In continuity style, jump cuts are errors to avoid. The French New Wave made them famous as a deliberate technique: Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960) uses jump cuts within scenes, including a car ride in which time skips repeatedly while the background changes. The effect is energetic, self-conscious and modern, reminding viewers they are watching a constructed film.

Today jump cuts are common in music videos, advertising and online video, where they compress talking-head footage and create a brisk rhythm. Other forms of discontinuity include deliberately crossing the 180-degree line, mismatched eyelines, and flash cuts of a frame or two that disrupt time. Discontinuity is not a failure if it is purposeful; analysis asks what effect it creates.

The long take

At the opposite extreme from rapid montage is the long take, a shot that lasts much longer than usual. Long takes give actors room to develop performances, let tension accumulate without the release of a cut, and allow viewers to explore the frame. Combined with deep staging and complex camera movement, they can choreograph entire scenes in one continuous shot. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) was designed to appear as a few very long takes, with cuts hidden as the camera passes behind objects. More recent films have used digital techniques to stitch shots invisibly so that much of a film appears to be one continuous take.

The French critic André Bazin argued in the 1940s and 1950s that long takes and deep focus respect the continuity of real space and time and leave the viewer free to choose what to look at, in contrast to montage, which imposes meaning. This debate between montage and realism, Eisenstein versus Bazin in simplified form, remains one of the classic arguments of film theory, discussed further in FILM-430.

Editing and meaning across a sequence

When analyzing a sequence's editing, combine the tools from this lesson and the last.

• Map the space: is continuity maintained, and where is it broken?
• Measure rhythm: count shots and time the sequence; note accelerations and pauses.
• Note juxtapositions: what meanings arise from placing particular shots side by side?
• Note transitions: cuts, dissolves, fades, match cuts.
• Relate to sound: how do music and effects shape the cutting?

American cinema has produced influential experiments in montage outside the mainstream. Avant-garde filmmakers such as Bruce Conner built films entirely from found footage, cutting newsreels, advertisements and old movies into ironic collages; his A Movie (1958) is often cited as a landmark of found-footage editing.

Editing, music and rhythm in practice

In modern films, editing rhythm is often shaped together with music. Editors may cut to the beat of a song in a montage sequence, or deliberately cut against the beat to create unease. In action sequences, shots may shorten as the music accelerates. In quiet dramas, an editor may let a single shot run through a whole musical phrase so that the image and music breathe together. A useful exercise is to watch a sequence twice: once with the sound on, noting where cuts fall, and once with the sound off, noticing how much of the rhythm you felt came from the music rather than the images.

Rhythm also depends on movement within the frame. A static shot of an empty room feels longer than a shot of the same duration filled with frantic action. Editors therefore judge shot length by feel as well as by the clock, which is one reason average shot length gives only a partial picture of a film's pace.

Finally, remember that discontinuity and continuity can coexist. Many contemporary films follow continuity principles most of the time and break them at key moments, such as a jump cut at a shock or a sudden smash cut from a quiet scene to a loud one. Those breaks gain power precisely because the rest of the film has trained us to expect smoothness.