If you want to understand montage, in a classical sense, then there is really no better clip to watch than this one because it encompasses both the central concept of Soviet montage theory, whereby, as Sergei Eisenstein says: “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other”, and the (originally American) style that creates a sense of the passage a greater length of time that the sequence itself by jumping from one image to the next.
Also, the now ubiquitous sports/kung-fu training sequence is elevated to a high art in this montage, allowing us to see not only both athletes at work, but at the same time showing the romantic and ideological motivations that drive each to perfection.
The Soviet athlete, aided by the most advanced technological machinery known to humanity in the 1980s (and thus bejewelled by all sorts of colourful fun lights) typifies the inhuman mechanics of the bureaucratic state. He is tooled to perfection, but there is a distance to it; it represents the logical end of the socialist experiment: a complete disconnection from the people. Even the potentially very hot to watch love scenes between Dolf Lungren and Bridget Nielson, his uberperfect girlfriend-scientist would probably be lifeless, despite the quivering muscles and perfectly toned flesh. Their love would be technically perfect, but it would lack the cuddly warm-meatballs affection of Rocky and his ever-patient homebody wife, Adrien (depicted here only once, poking her head through the barn door where Rocky trains with a sweet smile on her face; all the while probably wondering about the Lasagne she has in the oven baking for him when his day is finally done).
Rocky, meanwhile, is all about the simplicity of the countryside. Like Thoreau reborn, he betakes himself to the wilderness and is assisted only by the perpetually snowbound serfs of outer Russia in his quest to transform his body into a weapon of democracy. He drags around old horse-drawn carts and flings logs about in the snow and does all sorts of complicated sit-ups in an old barn and all in all personifies the myth of rural simplicity that pervades the strange core of the American Dream.
That the montage takes place in Russia is clearly a nod to Eisenstein and the other early Soviet filmmakers and theorists, and the fact that the two training sequences are laid over top of each other, to give a sense of all sorts of simultaneous actions occurring, which are related but not directly effected by each other, makes for powerful film making. Note, for example, the shot of the Russian field with the mountains in the backdrop at the very beginning of the sequence; clearly this is a short visual reference to with work of Tarkovsky; who was well known for his delight in long static shots of majestic natural vistas that seamlessly integrated into the larger narrative structures of the plot. As in Tarkovsky’s films, nature, here, is one of the main characters.
At the same time, however, (in a fittingly American style) the montage moves us forward through time, watching each of the boxers develop, while at the same time giving us in a nutshell (as is fitting for Soviet style montage) an entire symbolic history of the Cold War.
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