A montage (/mɒnˈtɑːʒ/ mon-TAHZH) is a film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information. Montages enable filmmakers to communicate a large amount of information to an audience over a shorter span of time by juxtaposing different shots, compressing time through editing, or intertwining multiple storylines of a narrative.

The term has varied meanings depending on the filmmaking tradition. In French, the word montage applied to cinema simply denotes editing. In Soviet montage theory, as originally introduced outside the USSR by Sergei Eisenstein, it was used to create symbolism. Later, the term "montage sequence", used primarily by British and American studios, became the common technique to suggest the passage of time.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, montage sequences often combined numerous short shots with special optical effects (fades/dissolves, split screens, double and triple exposures), dance, and music.

"Film historians differentiate two parallel schools of montage, that of the Soviets and that of Hollywood. The Soviet tradition, primarily distinguished by the writing and film work by S. M. Eisenstein is seen as intellectual, objectively analytical, and perhaps overly academic. Hollywood montage, romantic in the extreme, is written off as a series of wipes, dissolves, flip-flops and superimpositions..." —Film historian Richard Koszarski in Hollywood Directors: 1914-1940 (1976)

One of the original films to innovate montage filmmaking was Abel Gance's 1927 film Napoléon. The film uses montage throughout and its triptych finale includes a row of three reels of film playing either a continuous image or a montage of separate shots. Sergei Eisentein credited Gance with inspiring his fascination with montage, a technique he would become well-known for:

The word "montage" came to identify...specifically the rapid, shock cutting that Eisenstein employed in his films. Its use survives to this day in the specially created "montage sequences" inserted into Hollywood films to suggest, in a blur of double exposures, the rise to fame of an opera singer or, in brief model shots, the destruction of an airplane, a city or a planet.

Two common montage devices used are newsreels and railroads. In the first, as in Citizen Kane, there are multiple shots of newspapers being printed (multiple layered shots of papers moving between rollers, papers coming off the end of the press, a pressman looking at a paper) and headlines zooming on to the screen telling whatever needs to be told. In a typical railroad montage, the shots include engines racing toward the camera, giant engine wheels moving across the screen, and long trains racing past the camera as destination signs fill the screen.

"Scroll montage" is a form of multiple-screen montage developed specifically for the moving image in a web browser. It plays with Italian theatre director Eugenio Barba's "space river" montage in which the spectators' attention is said to "[sail] on a tide of actions which their gaze [can never] fully encompass". "Scroll montage" is usually used in online audio-visual works in which sound and the moving image are separated and can exist autonomously: audio in these works is usually streamed on internet radio and video is posted on a separate site.