Cut from a blank face to a bowl of soup and the face looks hungry; cut to a coffin and it looks grief-stricken. This episode explores Soviet montage theory, the radical 1920s movement that discovered the magic of movies happens in the cut, not the camera. We start with Lev Kuleshov, who compared fast-cut American films to slow theatrical Russian ones, coined the term montage in a 1916 essay, and ran the famous experiment with actor Ivan Mozzhukhin now known as the Kuleshov Effect, along with the modern researchers who have challenged its scientific validity.

We then break down Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage as collision, rooted in Marxist dialectics, his five-level hierarchy of metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal, and intellectual montage, the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, and the slaughtered bull in Strike. We contras ...