Montage

Montage is a film phenomenon that has changed in its use and meaning from its early days to modern Hollywood movies.

In the early days of film, the montage was what is known as Soviet Montage, pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein. Montages would be clips of an event interjected with juxtaposing clips of different thing that would be put together in the audience's mind to associate the two metaphorically.

The stairway scene from Battleship Potemkin.

In the stairway scene from the early film Battleship Potemkin, a town falls into chaos on the Odessa Stairway. As this happens, a mother's child is pushed down the stairs in a pram. Shots of women crying, including the mother, while the pram rolls down the stairs, and the town descending into chaos are all included with each other so that the audience is given a feeling of emotional distress as the events unfold.  The pram rolling down the stairs could metaphorically symbolise the town's descent into violence. 

The training montage from Team America.

In Hollywood films, and the majority of today's films, a montage is used to show the passage of time without having to include too much in terms of unnecessary detail. Rocky is a prime example of this, as the training montage seen in that particular series of films always shows Rocky going through a long time's worth of training but the editor has compressed this down to a short space of time so as not to bore audiences.

The humorous example of a montage from Team America: World Police does a similar thing to Rocky, but includes music that has lyrics relating to montage cliches as a way of parodying this famous film technique.

Thanks to Hollywood movies, montage has stopped being the intellectual and emotion invoking technique it once was and is now used to shorten a passage of time. This means that montage has now simply become a shadow of its former self as it's seen as more of a convenience, rather than something that engages the audience on many different levels, in today's world.