A grammar of the film : an analysis of film technique (1950)

Ideological Montage country works in the closest co-operation with the town. Science urges on the hens (as an aside; they are ignorant of their place in the system, and lead the same domestic lives); it regulates and cleanses the production of milk; it turns the farmhands into skilled operatives; it does not kill the romance of the country, but places beside its poetic qualities the rigour of efficiency. 13. We come now to ideological montage, which is the last, as it is also the most difficult type of montage to illustrate; not because examples are less frequent, but because the individual’s ideology varies so much with differences of class, political opinion and religious belief, that a concept which will provoke from one person a violent montage will slide smoothly into another’s framework of ideas. Alexander Room’s film The Ghost that Never Returns opens on a prison in a mining town in an unnamed South American state. Shots of a monotonous and miserable chain of prisoners, and of armed guards incessantly shadowing and harassing them, are interposed between titles exhibiting words such as ‘Humanity’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Culture’; while the prison building itself is shown to be laid out on modern and scientific lines. The meaning is clear: the South Americans use the pretence of perfect prisons with which to placate the outside world, and screen their barbarous persecution of the revolu 233