montage

noun

1. (countable)A composite work, particularly an artwork, created by assembling or putting together other elements such as pieces of music, pictures, texts, videos, etc.

   “Near-synonyms: collage, bricolage”

   “Examples of montage are seen in many modern films, and it is not a device which is physically difficult to use. The difficulty lies in the proper conception of the complete montage, for the cameraman must so completely visualize the finished result that he can proceed to assemble the various units without, at any time, seeing them as a whole until the film is processed.”

   “If you have mastered the art of spot printing and dodging, you are ready for something really advanced, a post-graduate course in montage. As a matter of fact, montage used to be called "dodging" by most photographers, and "multiple printing" by the fussy few.”

   “In the dissonant dynamics of [Hannah] Höch's simultaneous Dada montages the "nothing" and the "everything" of Dada were related to each other, both pessimistically and in a utopian manner.”

2. (uncountable)The art or process of doing this.

   “Near-synonyms: collage, bricolage”

3. (countable)A sequence of brief clips, often set to music, used to compress a long event or series of events into a short scene.

   “THE MYTH: Training montages are inspiring, harmless fun. At some point in any sports movie, the grossly unqualified underdog will start training to the sound of some inspirational rock song.”

   “Unfortunately, nothing much happens in the rest of the episode either. It gets to the point where a montage is devoted to establishing Sam's monotony at Oldtown.”

   “The day after that, I was still in pain, so I cycled. The day after that, the pain was manageable, so I ran again because I love to run. This was my training montage all the way up to the paratriathlon.”

verb

1. (transitive)To combine into, or depict as, a montage.

   “The Keartons and our staff had out-montaged [Vsevolod] Pudovkin. The result viewed to-day may be somewhat out of date—though I'm not sure—but of one thing I am certain—that it is as fine an example as I know of a maximum effect of cinematic movement achieved by patience in editing.”

   “The two background photographs shown in Fig. 2 were selected from the office files of Blakeslee-Lane Studios and then montaged together by copying onto a negative.”

   “Active in the field of environmental art since the 1960s, Nils-Udo builds structures, elaborates on the landscape in a scale that fits, montaging natural materials on site.”

   “Being ‘talking pictures’, [Mikhail] Romm’s and in particular [Fridrikh] Ermler’s films, based on huge conversation scenes, led both directors to discover a ‘deep mise en scène’, when in order to avoid splitting up the action, ‘the actors themselves, coming out of the depths into the foreground, alter the scale of the portrayal. They montage the film on the move, so to speak, moving along the longitudinal axis of the frame.’”

   “There are plays by playwrights and then there are theatre texts. What do I mean by this? […] Texts are woven; they are nets that gather meanings. They are braided, knotted, threaded, sewn, patched together, edited, montaged. They evolve in the process of making performance.”