TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The word “montage” was imported into theoretical discourse around cinema in Germany only in the latter half of the 1920s, following a German translation of texts by Soviet filmmakers and theorists, including Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Semyon Timoshenko. Until the mid-1920s, therefore, montage was not conceptualised by the theorists of German cinema. In this respect, Balázs was reproached by Eisenstein in 1926 for having “forgotten the scissors” in his text on Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925), because in that text Balázs vaunted the work of the camera without speaking of montage.^[1]