Montage had always been [Godard's] key to the cinema, a placing togather of two images, two sounds, to make a new meaning. This operation is not in fact dependent on the technology of the cinema, but it is cinema which discovered this operation – for Godard it is the discovery of cinema. Now, thanks fo the technology of video and to the generosity of […] the Swiss archive in Lausanne, Godard was able […] to undertake a montage of the twentieth century which juxtaposed the personal, the fictional, and the documentary in a way which simply ignored the usual assumptions of priority or importance of one element over another.

Colin McCabe on Histories of Cinema