10 Greatest Movie Montages Of All Time, Ranked

From the training montage in Rocky to the baptism massacre montage in The Godfather, there are plenty of iconic montages from film history. Pioneered by Sergei Eisenstein, the montage was initially designed as a way to create symbolism in a story, but its primary function in modern filmmaking is to create the illusion of the passage of time. Whether a boxer is training for a big fight or a gangster is rising through the ranks of the criminal underworld, a montage is a great way to cover a few weeks or months – or even years, in the case of Up’s “Married Life” sequence – in a short amount of runtime.