Avant-garde compositional principle representing objects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously — fragmented, prismatic. In cinema via montage, fractured framing, or simultaneous perspectives.
Cubism in film doesn't work like in painting — you can't simply fly a camera around an object and show everything simultaneously. Instead, it operates through temporal fragmentation: the same scene or action is cut from multiple spatially or perspectivally incompatible viewpoints, forcing the viewer to prismatically assemble the subject. This creates disorientation, ambiguity — much like Picasso's faceted faces.
On set, this is realized through deliberate fragmented framing. Instead of an establishing wide shot, you cut directly to a close-up, then a medium shot from the side, then tightly again — without classic continuity logic. The actual cubist moment occurs in the editing: you assemble shots in such a way that they are spatially irreconcilable without destroying the action. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin already employs such editing principles — not cubist in the sense of the art movement, but structurally related. Later, Godard and the New Wave used this more consciously: jump cuts, axial cuts, simultaneous perspectives within a frame.
Practically, this means you shoot a dialogue scene with conflicting spatial axes, or you edit wide shots and close-ups so that the viewer is never sure where they are. This isn't necessarily disturbing experimental film — it can also be subtle, conveying psychological disorientation or a character's internal fragmentation. Some digital-native directors also use split-screen or picture-in-picture as a cubist technique: multiple perspectives simultaneously in the same frame.
The difference from pure montage thinking lies in the intention: Cubism doesn't aim for narrative continuity or rhythm, but for simultaneous multi-perspectivalism. It's about visualizing complexity, not story efficiency. Those who understand this will recognize cubist approaches even in modern arthouse cinema or even in commercials that deliberately break spatial or temporal logic to generate attention.