As I do literature review for my final prospectus proposal, I have been thinking a lot about the idea of montage. In the works of early Soviet filmmakers, montage was the way to create and understand cinema: meaning was created from the collision between shots. Montage theory came at a key moment in cinema's history and proved generative in how we understood and theorized film. 

With the creation of new digital tools to analyze images, the importance of montage theory has resurfaced. On the one hand, many scholars trying out methods of computational analysis of film have turned to the work of Soviet montage theorists like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, and with good reason---their work is naturally predisposed for compelling results precisely given their focused on making the individual shot, as well as its ensuing relationship to the shots thereafter, count. For example, consider the work Lev Manovich's Software Initiative in creating visualizations of the different types of shots in Vertov's The Eleventh Year (1928):

Montage, then, works not only as visualization but as analytical method as well. Just as meaning was created in those early Soviet films by the collision of shots, new ways of looking at films nowadays--new ways of finding meaning in them--can be achieved by creating our own montages of the films we are working with. A few of the ways I have been thinking about these types of montages are the movie barcodes, which can be useful in noting changes in the color palette of a film to various degrees:

Or image montages like the one below, with a shot taken every five minutes from the same film:

How do these forms of taking apart and restructuring a film help us see it anew? I find that invoking montage theory as a form of film production but also a form of film transformation (and, subsequently, a method of analysis) is a productive way of bringing in old concepts to solve new questions.