Montage?

I really liked the article's beginning in that it traced the roots of Japanese culture as a means of unveiling modern Japanese cinema. That "timeline" was a great way of helping me to better understand how this has evolved over time and is a true process. Eisentstein begins by explaining how cinema is a montage. He spoke of its beginning form, the hieroglyph, which later morphed into brush and ink. This use of symbolism and representation was then compared to how we use montage within the context of the cinema: ".., combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content- into intellectual contexts and series."

He then transitions into the use of haikai, an ancient form of Japanese poetry, and explains how their use as an ideogram provides a means of uncovering an abstract concept. While referring to Japanese pictorial art, Eisentstein says, "Is not this process that of the ideogram, combining the independent "mouth" and the dissociated symbol of "child" to form the significance of "scream?"

Eisenstein later goes on to further analyze these montage sequences, particularly in specific shots from the film Potemkin. He explains that we as an audience combine these elements into one whole and uncover reasoning according to our own relations to the event. Eisentstein says, "Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction." That is motage.