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All definitions of montage have a common denominator; they all imply that meaning is not inherent in any one shot but is created by the juxtaposition of shots.

Although filmmaker are unable to control viewer’s interpretation, filmmaker can create a limited range of content by juxtaposition images. Montage is a juxtaposed sequence by the author to produce meanings. It is constraints rather than loose. Kuleshov effect is the excellent example. Lev Kuleshov, an early Russian filmmaker, intercut images of an actor’s expressionless face with images of a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child with a toy. Viewers of the film praised the actors’s performance; they saw in his face (emotionless as it was) hunger grief, and affection. They saw, in other words, what was not really there in the separate images. Meanings and emotion were created not by the content of the individual images but by the relationship of the images to one another.

Serige Eisenstein is the master of montage as produce marvellous images affecting viewers. Eisenstein highly employs Kuleshov effect in his film Strike (1925), especially in Slaughter scene.

Eisenstein combine two different images which are the slaughtering and the people running in order to visualise the massacres scenario onscreen. The slaughtering is really evocative of murdering and painful. Eisenstein makes a great impact on audience’s mental level. The Soviet soldiers don’t kill the people but we do. In our imagination between two images, we conceive of a massacre is happening but actually it isn’t.

Shields is a creative nonfiction writer, and this is a fantastic book. Why are we reading this? Because it is all about what in film is called editing, and in Korsakow might be thought of as linking via keywords. What Shields thinks of as collage. Could have been written for this subject.

While I was reading this book, I was able to comprehend Shields’s idea very well. Shields highly employ the notion of list as he divides the entire book into small pieces of fragment with numbers. It is a list of things that Shield’s idea about collage. 

Obviously, this is a non-fiction book but it seems like a notes by Shield himself. He has a variety of thoughts, short or long, in his book to explain his perception of collage. Shield appears to write down everything in his book as he has something come up in his mind. Therefore, Shield, as a nonfiction writer, is not concerned about the narrative as story structure might confused viewer. All his done is merely clarify the thoughts into a list so that viewer can easily read it.

It is plain and easy-understanding because of the list. The number is the signs that ensure audiences in the right track. Viewer wouldn’t be confused by the non-narrative things as Shield arrange it in an appropriate way. At least, personally, Shield explains the notion of collage very well.