THE FIRST TWO CHAPTERS presented us with the payoff for construing montage in a narrower fashion. Montage so understood retains the key appeal of Theodore Adorno's and Peter Bürger's proposal—intermedial status—but with the added benefit of being able to track the intermedial relations of the device's instances with unparalleled conceptual and historical precision. The disruptive perceptual effect initially identified in Dadaist photomontage, collage practices, and a subclass of “Russian films,” was with the appearance of Döblin's novel seen to appear in literature as well. It was not only the perceptual experience of disruption, however, that became constitutive of literary montage, but this experience due to a particular use of ready-mades—another element of montage pointing to its intermedial status. This much is revealed by the fact that the perceived absence of such disruptive use of readymades in Ulysses and Manhattan Transfer led the contemporary critics to reserve the notion of “montage” for Berlin Alexanderplatz only. Berlin Alexanderplatz and its reception therefore becomes a privileged site for articulating both the intermedial history of the concept and its perceptual, stylistic, and narratological parameters.

If analysis of contemporary reports articulating perceptual experiences reveals what is common to montage across arts, this chapter demonstrates that stylistics and narratology shed light on what is specific to each medium. From the perspective of stylistics, each medium will have its own type of ready-made. Photomontage uses existing photographs, collage readily available everyday objects, and literature well-known linguistic “genres.” Although they are not essential to film montage in the sense that they are to montage in other arts, the analysis of Piel Jutzi's film will show that film can also use ready-mades in its montage sequences. Specifically, some of the montage shots appear to employ found footage insofar they seem to exhibit little or no control over the mise-en-scène and are characterized by erratic camera movements and a projection rate of less than twenty-four frames per second.

Because the use of ready-made material is not essential to it, the key to understanding film montage remains its disruptive perceptual effect. In the previous chapter, I argued that in the case of literary montage the perceptual disruption can be explained narratologically—only those ready-mades that cannot be understood as issuing either from “Döblin” or other any diegetic character elicit the experience in question.