Montage theory: Eisenstein, Vertov, and Hitchcock
2: Vertov & montage
1: Eisenstein & montage
3. Hitchcock & montage

Eisenstein's Soviet contemporary Dziga Vertov stridently criticized Eisenstein's commitment to narrative film. Nevertheless, Vertov obviously learned from Eisenstein and applied the theory of montage to his documentary ideal of presenting "life caught unaware." Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) took montage to lengths beyond Eisenstein; indeed, Vertov's elaborate, often frenetic montage was unmatched until the era of music video.

The Man with the Movie Camera is an encyclopedia of montage effects:

1. A graphic match: two consecutive images unrelated except by visual similarity:
2. Visual-linguistic punning: a montage playing on the similarity in Russian language of the words for eye and window, as well as the name of Vertov's experimental film group, the Camera Eye:
3. A movie poster with a man making a 'shhhh' gesture (earlier seen with the movie's title, A Woman's Awakening), followed by a shot of a woman asleep. The film later depicts this woman waking:
4. A lesson in Marxist economics: a montage traces the production process from a miner, to a power plant, to factory laborers using the power to manufacture goods (whose value, according to Marxism, is determined by the labor put into them):
5. Montage with an ideological message: Vertov intercuts shots of frivolous activities with visually matching shots of productive labor (including film editing):
6. The meta-film: We see the process of film making: a strip of unedited film, the editor's scissors, edited film, then the projected image:
7. A meta-step further: We see the cameraman shooting film, then the audience watching that same shot in a theatre--combining the making of the movie, our watching of the movie being made, the exhibition of the movie to an audience, and our watching that audience watching the movie that we have seen being made, which is the same movie that we are watching ourselves!
The Kuleshov effect:
In The Man with the Movie Camera, Vertov includes a visual joke referring to famous experiments in montage carried out by the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov intercut shots of the expressionless face of an actor with various other shots such as soup, a coffin, and a pretty girl. He discovered that the film audience interpreted the actor's single expression as hungry, sad, happy, etc., according to the images with which it was associated. This became known as the "Kuleshov effect," an important contribution to montage theory.

Vertov includes shots of store dummies in his film as a humorous tribute to the Kuleshov effect.