Tertium Quid

Film production theory comes with its consequences, understanding terms that are not entirely obvious at first hand, an example of such difficult theory would be the term "Tertium Quid". According to our notes, they characterize the viewer’s response to putting 2 images together, such as the famous class example of Darth Vader next to a puppy. :P If you were like me and you still didn't quite grasp the meaning of the definition, the following should help:

In today's modern societies, with all its newly developed technologies and harsh criticism, the old practice of movie making has reached its peek not only with its great actors and fancy effects, but in video editing to make it more believable and appealing to the human eye. Thats were the term "Montage" comes into play, which basically consists of juxtaposing images together. But during the 1920s, the pioneering Russian film directors and theorists Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov demonstrated the technical, aesthetic, and ideological potentials of montage. Eisenstein believed that film montage could create ideas or have an impact beyond the individual images. Two or more images edited together create a "tertium quid" (third thing) that makes the whole greater than the sum of its individual parts. Eisenstein's greatest demonstration of the power of montage comes in the "Odessa Steps" sequence of his 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. On the simplest level, montage allows Eisenstein to manipulate the audience's perception of time by stretching out the crowd's flight down the steps for seven minutes, several times longer than it would take in real time.

A good example would be the famous sequence involving a runaway baby carriage. This shows that Eisenstein used montage to grasp both emotion and ideological consciousness among the film's viewers:



http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/montage/montage-1.html