Montage Montage is the process of editing different shots together to form a sequence. In the very beginning, with films from the Lumières, Edison and Méliès, there was no editing at all (Dancyger, 2011, p.3). They were one single static shot, appearing more like a stage play than a modern movie. The innovation of editing and montage came from Edwin S. Porter and The Life of An American Fireman (1903). Karel Reisz (2014, p.6) says “Porter had demonstrated that the single shot, recording an incomplete piece of action, is the unit of which films must be constructed and thereby established the basic principle of editing.” Dancyger (2011) suggests that the contemporary idea of editing originated with D. W. Griffith. His experimentation of far closer shots than anyone had done before, as well as match cutting and cross-cutting between parallel action evoked far greater drama than those that came before. Reisz goes on to say that this new form of editing was unprecedented. Now the moving image resembles the sequence more than the still photograph or the single static shot film. Before the advent of editing a film appeared like a magical moving photograph, the frame was still and the characters moved around within it. Now a whole new picture was forced upon the viewer, replacing the previous one. Each shot placed before and after one another changes the context in which they are collectively read, “It implied that the meaning of a shot was not necessarily self-contained but could be modified by joining the shot to others.” (Reisz, 2014, p.5).
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