We have seen instances in the previous chapter of William Faulkner using montage. We now need to turn to the leading theorist of montage – the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein – and to a novelist who from the beginning of his career saw film as helping his aim of social investigation: John Dos Passos. Although Eisenstein will figure in this chapter as a leading practitioner and theorist of montage, he himself admitted that this form of construction had been suggested to him by the methods of D. W. Griffith, the ‘most thrilling figure against this background’ as he called him. As many critics have noted, Griffith pioneered a method of cutting between sequences which became one of the hallmarks of modernist fiction and which Michael Rogin has summarized as follows:

It is this fracturing of narrative sequence which we will encounter again and again in the present chapter and in subsequent chapters in which juxtaposition features prominently.