Collage
The modernist tradition of collage uses the visual principle of juxtaposing images from clearly different times and places joining together an array of artifacts or fragments.
The nonfiction film generally offered immense opportunity for collage. It was not bound by the conventions of continuity in time and space that governed the character-centered fiction film, particularly in classic Hollywood narrative. It could mix together images from anywhere to support or create a point. It was not bound by the need to show only what could plausibly be part of a fictitious character's world where dream, flashback, fantasy, or abstract summary provided the outer limits of visual montage. Documentary could combine any and everything as long as the voice of the filmmaker and interpretive action of the audience remained to lend shape and meaning to the result.
“From Here, from This Side” is a collage documentary that begins with an opposed collection of stereotypes, first of North Americans as seen from Mexico, and then of Mexicans seen from the U.S. (primarily in classic Mexican movie clips). It proceeds to develop an argument directed at Mexicans about the need to reenvision cross-cultural relations, emerge from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the U.S., assume responsibility for Mexico's own economic problems, and reimagine in conjunction with the U.S. the international arena as a single space mutually inhabited for mutual benefit or destruction. That argument touches on Mexican debt load, the oil crisis, and neo-colonialism. Incorporated into the visual collage of existing materials is an oral collage, including texts by Mexican author Octavio Paz and others and sound effects from popular U.S movies. Particularly striking is the repeated use of clips from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which the scene is played and replayed from a U.S. and Mexican point of view.
SOURCES:
http://www.filmsound.org/film-sound-history/documentary.htm
http://www.library.american.edu/subject/media/aufderheide/fromhere.html