In classical film narratives, mise en scene works to synchronize with plot development. Costume, set details, lighting or weather might mirror or reinforce the psychology of a character, for example. The Hollywood three-point lighting system outlines and separates the protagonists from the background and other secondary characters. But the distribution of visual details, even in a classical narrative film, always threatens to distract from the more “important” and hierarchical details of plot and narrative momentum.  Image has a power to spill over any kind contained meaning. In non-classical and nonmimetic forms of cinema, the tension between image and narrative meaning is exploited in order to destabilize the viewer's "understanding" of the visual field. Perhaps the details in mise en scene begin to a tell a different story than the one the characters are pretending to be involved in. Or the mise en scene introduces many simultaneous narratives that compete for attention.

Similarly, page layout or mise en page, can be either a collage of disparate, competing elements or a delineated hierarchy. Interface design, like production design in movies, is an affective art to primarily guide attention as it flows through and around multiple elements on a screen. Gestalt design principles, such as contrast, proportion, proximity, isolation and repetition create hierarchies of importance in layout.  But an interface that disrupts such clear orderings, forces a user to work at interpreting the visual field, to ask question about the relations between elements, to speculate about narrative meaning.

The cultural shift from photographic mimesis to spatial montage, a shift that Manovich equates in his art and writing with the ascendency of database logic, introduces new ways of conceiving relational aspects of space, time, eventness and subjectivity. Spatial montage is a form of semantic collage. As soon as two distinct images appear together on a screen, mimetic realism is broken. The surface of engagement may have a kind semiotic realism—the elements may be juxtaposed in a culturally meaningful or referential way—but the illusion of presence is lost. In spatial montage, the screen becomes an interface to a relational set. Like gestalt in interface design, the whole perceived in spatial montage works when a mental model can be made out of bottom-up and top-down processes of distributed attention.