Montage (Jackpot January #29)

If I could go back and cut out a word from each of these previous posts, which would I choose?

Imagine your life as something you hold in your hands, made of fragile glass, and you drop it. It shatters into a thousand pieces. Do you think you could put it back together right? Would you want to?

I’ve tried collage, tried writing with the ‘cut and stick’ method before. It’s not that the results are bad, it’s just that my heart isn’t in it. I think I’ll always like making more than rearranging.

Collage and montage differ mainly in the relationship between their constituent parts. A montage is a bunch of semantically-related clips that imply change over the passage of time. For instance, the classic training montage in every sports film shows the actor(s) doing a bunch of exercise to get fit for their sport. A collage, on the other hand, may contain some relationship between its elements, but if there is one, it is always open to interpretation. A montage is open, and a collage is closed.

When you try and arrange events into an order, you cannot create pure collage in your head. We think in terms of montage, in terms of connected events that provoke change across time.

It’s cool to think I could make something new just by mixing up everything I’ve ever written; I’d love to do collage like that. But what saddens me is knowing I could never get rid of the drive to make it mean something, to arrange it in a coherent manner or at least a manner which has some kind of meaning or association.

None of us can really escape from that instinct to connect things. It’s automatic, our brains do it without asking.