montage

  a French word literally meaning "editing", "putting together" or "assembling shots"; refers to a filming technique, editing style, or form of movie collage consisting of a series of short shots or images that are rapidly put together into a coherent sequence to create a composite picture, or to suggest meaning or a larger idea; in simple terms, the structure of editing within a film; a montage is usually not accompanied with dialogue; dissolves, cuts, fades, super-impositions, and wipes are often used to link the images in a montage sequence; an accelerated montage is composed of shots of increasingly-shorter lengths; contrast to mise-en-scene

  Examples: the famous 'breakfast' montage scene in Citizen Kane (1941) - that dramatized the deterioration of Kane's first marriage; the ambush scene in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the 45 second shower scene in Psycho (1960) - with between 71-78 camera set-ups for the shooting of the scene and 50 splices (where two pieces of film are joined); or the 'Odessa Steps' montage in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) including three successive shots of stone lions in various positions - filmed to look as though they were one lion rising to its feet and roaring in fury and anger at the massacre