The technique of interruption pervades all levels of the stage work of the German modernist theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht—the dramatic, theatrical and performative. At its most elemental, it is a formal treatment of material that imposes a "freeze", a "framing", or a change of direction of some kind; something that is in progress (an action, a gesture, a song, a tone) is halted in some way. The technique of interruption produces an effect on the dramatic level akin to the 'pair of scissors' that Brecht imagines cutting a drama into pieces, "which remain fully capable of life"; the metaphor of the cut is a pertinent one, as the technique bears striking similarities to the principles of montage being developed in the Soviet Union contemporaneously with Brecht's "epic theatre" (by the film-makers Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov).