It was as if this word, signifying an abrupt change in space and time, also initiated another kind of vision that would be necessary to see, to read what was to follow. One needed to follow these images not merely chronologically, but associatively. SUDDENLY, one’s whole notion of spatial and temporal continuity was shattered. Eisenstein’s purposeful combination of events that were happening successively and simultaneously forces the spectator to construct another time frame: one which is bound by the limits of the film and not by the always doomed attempt to mimic real life.
Michael Tarantino, A Few Brief Moments of Cinematic Time (1999). Quoted in The Cinematic, from MIT Press.
