The word montage derives from French montage (assembly, mounting), from the verb monter (to mount, go up, assemble), which traces through Vulgar Latin *montare to Latin mons (mountain). The etymological progression from mountain to mounting to assembling reflects a metaphorical extension: to mount something is to place it up, to build it up, to put it together — the constructive act of assembly.
In French, montage is a general technical term for assembly or installation — one speaks of the montage of machinery, furniture, or any constructed system. English borrowed the word in the 1920s with a specifically artistic meaning: the technique of combining separate images, sounds, or shots to create a new composite whole.
The artistic concept of montage has two distinct traditions. In visual art, photomontage — the combination of photographs into composite images — emerged from Dadaist and Constructivist art in the 1910s and 1920s. Artists like Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Alexander Rodchenko used photomontage as a tool of political commentary and aesthetic experimentation, cutting and recombining photographs to create images that challenged conventional perception.
In cinema, montage became the dominant theoretical concept of Soviet filmmaking in the 1920s. Sergei Eisenstein, the most influential theorist of montage, argued that the fundamental unit of cinema was not the individual shot but the collision between shots. Meaning, Eisenstein claimed, did not reside within any single image but emerged from the juxtaposition of images — just as a spark emerges from the collision of two stones.
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) demonstrated his montage theory with devastating effectiveness. The Odessa Steps sequence — in which shots of soldiers, civilians, a baby carriage, and boots are cut together with accelerating rhythm — became the most influential editing sequence in cinema history, studied and imitated by every generation of filmmakers since.
In popular culture, montage acquired a different connotation in Hollywood: the training montage, the passage-of-time montage, the falling-in-love montage — sequences that compress extended periods into brief, music-driven compilations. This usage, parodied by the Team America song 'Montage,' represents a domestication of what was originally a revolutionary artistic concept.