Cutting to the Chase: How Cinema Lost Its Most Powerful Storytelling Tool

There is a scene in GoodFellas that lasts approximately three minutes and contains almost no meaningful dialogue. Henry Hill rises through the ranks of organized crime, years collapse into seconds, and the audience understands everything—his hunger, his belonging, his moral corrosion—without a single character stopping to explain themselves. Martin Scorsese does not tell you who Henry Hill has become. He shows you, through rhythm, music, and the accumulated weight of carefully chosen images. It remains one of the most instructive pieces of filmmaking in American cinema.

It is also, increasingly, the kind of sequence modern Hollywood no longer knows how to execute.

The Mechanics of Compression

The montage, in its classical sense, is not merely a highlight reel or a training sequence set to an upbeat song. At its most sophisticated, it is a precise editorial argument—a series of images whose meaning emerges not from any single frame but from the collision between them. Soviet filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein theorized this in the 1920s, and Hollywood absorbed those lessons across the following decades, eventually producing a distinctly American form: kinetic, emotionally direct, and narratively efficient.

The genius of the technique lies in compression. A film has roughly two hours to move a character from one psychological state to another, to track the rise and fall of a relationship, or to convey the passage of years. Dialogue scenes accomplish this slowly. A well-constructed montage accomplishes it in minutes—or less—while simultaneously generating a visceral, almost physical sensation in the audience that no amount of conversation can replicate.

Brian De Palma understood this intuitively. The Untouchables' train station sequence, Scarface's rise-and-fall architecture, the split-screen passages that fragment and multiply perspective—De Palma approached editing as a composer approaches counterpoint. Every cut was a note in a larger musical argument. The experience of watching those films is inseparable from their editorial structure.

Where the Discipline Went

Something began to shift in American cinema around the turn of the millennium, and the change has accelerated steadily since. The causes are multiple and interconnected.

Streaming platforms, which now shape the economics of film production as profoundly as the studio system once did, have conditioned both creators and audiences to expect a television-adjacent pacing. In prestige television—the dominant narrative form of the past two decades—dialogue carries most of the weight. Characters explain their motivations, articulate their histories, and verbalize their emotional states with a directness that would have seemed crude in the classical Hollywood era. When filmmakers trained in or influenced by that environment turn to feature films, they bring those habits with them.

The rise of franchise filmmaking has compounded the problem. Films embedded in shared universes carry enormous informational obligations—characters must acknowledge events from previous installments, establish setups for future ones, and service audiences who may have varying degrees of familiarity with the broader mythology. This creates structural pressure toward verbal exposition, toward scenes that exist primarily to transfer information rather than to generate experience.

The result is a cinema that increasingly tells rather than shows—that treats the audience as a party to be briefed rather than a sensibility to be engaged.

What the Frame Can Do That Words Cannot

Consider the difference between a character saying "I've become someone I no longer recognize" and a montage that demonstrates that transformation through accumulating visual evidence. The first approach is efficient in a narrow sense—it conveys information quickly. But it forecloses the audience's participation. There is nothing to interpret, nothing to feel your way toward. The meaning has been pre-digested and delivered.

The second approach demands more of the viewer and, in doing so, rewards them proportionally. When Scorsese cuts between images in Raging Bull—Jake LaMotta's body changing, his relationships deteriorating, the world contracting around him—the audience does not receive a conclusion. They arrive at one. That distinction is the difference between passive consumption and genuine cinematic experience.

The best montage sequences in American film history—the "Getting Things Done" passage in All That Jazz, the compressed decades of a marriage in Up, the training sequences in Rocky that function as compressed mythologies—achieve their effects precisely because they trust the audience. They present evidence and allow the viewer to perform the emotional synthesis. That trust is, in itself, a form of respect.

The Directors Who Still Remember

It would be inaccurate to suggest the discipline has vanished entirely. Certain filmmakers continue to treat editing as a primary expressive instrument rather than a logistical necessity.

Damien Chazelle, whose work is suffused with a visible reverence for classical Hollywood, constructs sequences in Whiplash and La La Land that compress time and emotional state with genuine sophistication. The opening of Babylon is essentially a sustained meditation on montage as controlled chaos. Paul Thomas Anderson's editing rhythms in Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza carry psychological weight that his dialogue scenes only partially account for.

But these directors represent a conscious counter-movement, not a norm. They are working against the prevailing tendency, which makes their achievements more notable and more isolated than they should be.

A Question of Education and Ambition

The montage problem is, at its root, a question of what filmmakers believe cinema is for. If film is primarily a delivery mechanism for story information—a more immersive version of reading a plot summary—then verbal exposition is perfectly adequate. It is efficient, it is clear, and it requires no particular faith in the audience's visual literacy.

If film is something else—an art form capable of generating experiences unavailable in any other medium, of compressing time and emotion into pure sensory argument—then the abandonment of montage represents a genuine impoverishment. It is the equivalent of a novelist who has decided that metaphor is too demanding and has resolved to state everything plainly.

The frame, at its most powerful, does not merely record. It argues, it implies, it accumulates meaning across cuts in ways that words cannot replicate. When contemporary cinema forgets this, it does not simply become less interesting. It becomes less itself.

The best American films were built on the understanding that a sequence of images, properly ordered, could break your heart or ignite something in you that you could not fully explain. That understanding is worth recovering—one cut at a time.