Anticipating Film Socialisme, Part 3:

"... montage is what made cinema unique and different as compared to painting and the novel. Cinema as it was originally conceived is going to disappear quite quickly, within a lifetime, and something else will take its place. But what made it original, and what will never really have existed, like a plant that has never really left the ground, is montage. The silent movie world felt it very strongly and talked about it a lot. No-one found it. Griffith was looking for something like montage, he found discovered the close-up. Eisenstein naturally thought that he had found montage... But by montage I mean something much more vast."

Godard, "Le montage, la solitude et la liberte"; translation by Trond Lundemo