After the Odessa Steps Massacre in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), the helicopter attack setpiece in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is almost certainly the second-best edited sequence in the history of motion pictures. Like the third and final monument to the magic of montage—the attack on Hidetora’s castle in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985)—these episodes tend to stand out from the features of which they are constituent parts, like little islands of perfection; they are Matterhorns and Everests, not just separate peaks in ongoing mountain chains. Indeed, when considered as independent courts métrages, they seem aesthetically superior to the longs métrages from which they are abstracted, despite the absence of a proper beginning or end and so many other— usually essentia —cinematic attributes. The primary purpose of this essay is to find out how and why this should be.