Filming the Odessa Steps sequence for the seminal film Battleship Potemkin (1925) by the great Sergei Eisenstein. While there was an actual mutiny aboard the Potemkin and demonstrations by workers on that same day that enthusiastically greeted the ship when it pulled into harbor there was no massacre on the steps. Eisenstein did such a masterful job that even today most people visiting the steps expect to see some kind of memorial to the massacre.
The sequence itself has come to be accepted as the ultimate example of montage as developed by Eisenstein. Eisenstein himself described montage in several different contexts but primarily focused on the summation that it contains several different images, editing not necessarily for continuity but for overall effect in which a new idea emerges that is not present in any individual shot. For a deeper elaboration of the theory as it particularly relates to Potemkin go here.
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