Then came the real movies, with the narrative ready-made for the viewer. Now we can relive a version of that early modern moment on the train when we surf TV channels by remote control, or here on the Web, we browse the pages maybe at random making our own sense out of somebody else's messages. Magical Territory - The Art of Montage Photomontage has come a long way from the days when a collage artist spent hours rummaging through a pile of magazines snipping out photos and sticking them with scissors and paste. It's an ambiguous experience whatever you think. And some collage works best simply because the joins are bizarre .
Montage is a bit like graffiti but it had to wait until the invention of photography.
Or maybe the steam engine. Looking out of the window of a train human beings were, for the first time, exposed to a variety of places and scenes they'd only heard about or seen pictures of flashing at speed. They may have been there in their dreams before but this was real. One minute a field of cows, then a mountain, a lake, a forest, someone shaking a rug in their backyard would unspooled before the train traveller's gaze through the 'screen' of the carriage window, like scenes from a movie not yet invented. Then came the real movies, with the narrative ready-made for the viewer.