ABSTRACTWhat happens when a film term such as ‘montage’ undergoes translation? This article looks at the theoretical permutations of ‘montage’ as it was translated and introduced into China beginning in the early 1930s and the resulting film practices as the term continued to be reread, redefined and reinvented during the communist era. As a result of the attraction to the revolutionary allure of Soviet montage in the 1930s, a mysterious aura was attached to the Chinese transliteration mengtaiqi, which literally means ‘veil (is) too strange’. In a period of intense engagement with international film theory during the ‘seventeen years’ (1949–1966), Chinese filmmakers demystified the inscrutability of montage in an effort to broaden its scope to refer to all film editing methods, including Hollywood continuity editing and Soviet montage. Through close reading of selected films, I look at how montage was creatively reinvented to construct a collectivized subject cinematically.