ct. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, for example, contends that any inconsistencies that may occur in Eisenstein's writings after 1930 were simply reactions to the changing political climate and an attempt to avoid "dangerous heresy" (xiii).
However, Bordwell's argument is persuasive, especially when examining several key concepts that Eisenstein puts forward regarding the idea of montage itself. Nowell-Smith contends that montage is simply "the ordinary word for film editing" (xiii). Yet Eisenstein uses the word in a broader sense. Throughout his writings, he uses montage to mean juxtaposition (primarily of images but also of other elements, such as music). He eventually defines a number of different types of montage, achieved by a variety of technical means and designed to accomplish a variety of specific purposes, but the juxtaposition itself is the process that continues to consume his interest.
In his earlier writings, Eisenstein likens montage to Japanese hieroglyphics, in which "the combination of two 'representable' objects achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented" ("Beyond" 139). He argues, "The shot is a montage cell" ("Beyond" 144). By this, he means that a montage is made up of a series of shots, which can be as brief as a single frame of film. Although he acknowledges the fact that the "motion" of motion pictures derives from persistence of vision, as one slightly altered image is superimposed over a previous image of the same object, he is more concerned with the intercutting of images of different objects and the ways in which these two images come together to create something new.
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