“As is well known, film montage reached artistic maturity through Sergei Eisenstein. And a shot (Einstellung), as Rainer Werner Fassbinder says, is in a double sense not only the set angle of the camera perspective, it also shows the attitude of the author. Putting such shots together, relating them to each other, putting them under time pressure, so to speak, then creates a complex statement.

In music, one is used to the unity of performance. You can cut up a melody, but hardly a cello and not its player, not the present. Performance cannot be heterogeneous at all; in this practice in the here and now there is no suddenness, everything has its organic catching up, breathing; there is only its own time. Film, on the other hand, needs no upbeat; montage is the art of no upbeat, of shocks.  

Film is a narrowly defined frame that reveals nothing of the surrounding, and in terms of time, changes of setting follow one another abruptly, between which there may actually have been hours, weeks, a century. Their sequences are possibly reversed, the time cursor jumps continuously, back and "over graves forward". In contrast to the rhythms of a cello played live, the continuum of time is lost in the rhythms given to a cello recording by cuts, replaced by artificial arrangement or perhaps by order or time itself. Film is a time medium in a double sense: it transmits past time in its own time sequence.

Composing music cinematically, staging notes, placing sound wave visualizations, with these I can articulate attitudes to music in general, frame them, comment on them aesthetically and form symbols. In any case, I have long understood composing music to be similar to filming, in other words: there is always something already in front of the lens, there is no blank sheet of music, one includes what is already there in a frame, edits, rebuilds. The Kantian question, "What can I know at all?" also means: What can I compose at all? The state of instruments and digital hardware, the structure of musical notation and software, the Internet archive, the concepts of listening, these are the media of composition that are given or are to be pushed further.  
And in the meantime I also work as a filmmaker, which means that I understand film as a reflection medium of music and music as a reflection medium of film (…)”.

Johannes Kreidler
20:21 Rhythms of History