Montage

Montage is a compositional device borrowed by literature from the art of cinema, consisting in the joining and juxtaposition of separate fragments, episodes, images, and planes according to the principle of contrast, association, or parallelism, rather than by a smooth cause-and-effect sequence. Montage allows the fictional time and space to be compressed, permits sharp transitions from one scene to another, and brings heterogeneous material into collision, generating new meanings from the juxtaposition itself. This device was actively developed by modern twentieth-century prose, which sought to convey the fragmentation and dynamism of the modern perception of the world. In Ukrainian literature a master of montage, 'cinematographic' composition was Yurii Yanovsky, whose novel The Horsemen is built as a series of separate, internally connected novella-'frames'; montage thinking also marks the prose and film-dramaturgy of Oleksandr Dovzhenko. Montage enriched narrative technique, broadening the possibilities of the compositional organization of artistic material.