All film directors know the film conventions and how to manipulate the audience through film techniques. Everything in the film composition has a purpose. All editing, the combination of separate shots into a continuous narrative, also has a purpose. The most sophisticated work on representation and visual literacy has been done with cinema and film.
Montage is the editing together of disparate shots in order to create meaning.
Montage is a process in which a number of shorter shots are woven together in order to communicate a great deal of information in a short period of time. Montage is used to manipulate time, transcend vast spaces, and make connections between concurrent stories. A major purpose of montage is to create a narrative. A narrative is a chain of events,occuring in a given point in time, at a given point of space, where parts of it effect other parts. Major montage techniques used to produce narratives are linear, flashbacks, and cross or parallel editing which is used to track more than one story or character.