V

		it can be analyzed, dissected, and its true function in the social and political world determined and demonstrated. Nothing is sacred in this kind of editing free-for-all. Every captured bit functions not only within one specific ensemble, it can also be made to serve differently in other centers of activity. With Noel Burch then, "one may safely say that there is not a single shot in this entire film whose place in the editing scheme is not overdetermined by a whole set of intertwined chains of signification. . . ." 35 In other words, the parts cannot really be understood at the time of their viewing. We need to see the entire film before being able to think back and reorganize in our mind what we saw. As with Eisenstein, the film is thus not just the sum of its parts. Instead of merely sending us new bits to be made sense of once and for all, the editing forces the viewer to continually revisit the same parts, each time armed with a different set of insights. Action and reaction do not have to be immediately contiguous any more, instead they can be inferred at any time and from any distance. Straightforward causality, as a result, does not have to be established by a witnessing camera. Rather, following Deleuze, "any point whatsoever in space itself perceives all the points on which it acts, or which act on it, however, far these actions and reactions extend."36 Never again did the cut open such a gap in film continuity, never again were the pieces that were juxtaposed one after the other so radically held together for scrutiny. To this day, The Man with a Movie Camera remains the most ambitious piece of filmmaking ever assembled. It keeps on speaking, and speaking, and speaking.

		VII

		Montage was not revisited until after World War II when Andr Bazin questioned the ethics involved in the cutting operation. In "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" and other articles, he attacked all types of editing but especially the Soviet kind insofar as, in their films, "the meaning is not within the image itself, it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage onto the field of consciousness of the spectator."37 Let us illustrate what Bazin finds objectionable. Throughout October, the Mensheviks or Social Democrats are not unlike the hard-liners in general appearance. What informs us about their political philosophy is that their speeches are followed by shots of hands playing on harps or balalaikas so as to bring out their mellifluent opportunism.38 We do not get the infor-