Film montage creates entirely new concepts by colliding two unrelated images in the viewer's mind
Sergei Eisenstein pioneered an editing style that treats shots like chemical elements, colliding them to spark new intellectual concepts that do not exist in the individual images themselves.
Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein developed 'intellectual montage' by drawing inspiration from Japanese kanji, where combining the symbols for 'eye' and 'water' creates the new concept of 'tears.' In his 1925 film 'Strike,' he famously intercut shots of fleeing workers being mowed down with footage of a bull being slaughtered in an abattoir. Neither shot alone depicted 'oppression'; the concept was born only through their violent collision in the viewer's mind.
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