Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) made editing the heart of film theory. In Battleship Potemkin (1925), he showed that meaning can come from how shots collide, not only from what each shot shows.
He called it montage. Two images placed side by side create a third idea in the viewer's mind. In Potemkin, three shots of stone lions, one resting and two rising, seem to show a statue waking up in protest.
The Odessa Steps sequence is the famous example. Soldiers march down the steps, a baby carriage rolls loose, and faces in the crowd are cut against boots and rifles. Eisenstein stretches time by cutting, and the scene dramatizes events more than it records them, which is part of montage's power.
Later directors borrowed from it, including Brian De Palma in The Untouchables. Eisenstein's lesson holds for any editor today: the cut is not a seam between shots, but the place where new meaning is made.
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