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New ways of city viewing
SPECIAL SERIES ON URBAN DESIGN
New ways of city viewing Francis Russell
This paper investigates the emergence of the film montage method as a new form of urban representation during the early part of the 20th century. Interest is focused on the development of film montage as a vehicle for a new modem consciousness which has evolved out of a rapidly changing urban environment. Montage is analysed as a revolutionary way of perceiving the city and comparable examples from our time are sought in urban design representations. Francis Russell is Research Associate, Center for Urban Design, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
~Hannes Meyer, 'The New World', in Claude Schmaidt, Hannes Meyer, Alec Tiranti Lid, 1965 (article first published 1926). 2Raymond Williams, 'Eisenstein's aesthetic', City and Country, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, p 235. In this book Williams compiled an extensive survey of precedents in literature relating to the urban experience.
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Motor cars dash along our streets. On a traffic island in the Champs Elysdes from 6 to 8 pm there rages round one metrol.×~litan dynamicism at its most strident. Fords and Rolls Royce have burst open the core of the town, obliterating distance and effacing the boundaries between town and country. Aircraft slip through the air: Fokker and Farman widen our range of movement and the distance between us and the earth: they disregard national frontiers and bring nation closer to nation. Illuminated sign.~ twinkle, loud-speakers screech, postors advertise, display windows shine forth. The simultaneity of events enormously extends our concept of space and time, it enriches our life. We live faster and therefore longer . . . The revolution in our attitude of mind to the reorganization of our world calls for a change in our media of expression. M e y e r was certainly not the first to suggest that a search for manifestations of a new p h e n o m e n o l o g y was c o m i n g into its own at the b e g i n n i n g of this century. But he was o n e of the m o r e fervent a d v o c a t e s of a new form of r e p r e s e n t a t i o n for a world view delivered by the Industrial R e v o l u t i o n of a l m o s t a c e n t u r y before. O n e of the most r e v o l u t i o n a r y of these f o r m s was the m o n t a g e m e t h o d of c i n e m a t i c representation developed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is the p u r p o s e of this p a p e r to e x a m i n e the inception of this art, to c o n s i d e r the cross cultural relat i o n s h i p that such a new t e c h n i q u e had with the o t h e r arts a n d its i m p o r t a n c e as a m o d e l for describing the perceptions of the t h e n n o v e l m o d e r n u r b a n experience. T h e p r o b l e m of u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d expressing individual p e r c e p t i o n s of the m o d e r n city has vexed u r b a n designers for decades. Few, if any, graphic t e c h n i q u e s h a v e a d e q u a t e l y
d e s c r i b e d the total u r b a n e x p e r i e n c e . T h e m o n t a g e m e t h o d has b e e n used f r e q u e n t l y by u r b a n designers to repr e s e n t the complexity of u r b a n perceptions, o n paper, in film, a n d in electronic media. Necessary to t h e use of this t e c h n i q u e is an u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h a t its suitability for describing the city is a p r o d u c t of its inception in the early years of m o d e r n u r b a n i s m . T h e transformation of greater society d u r i n g the Industrial R e v o l u t i o n did not occur only at the mill gates. T h e true fruits of the Industrial R e v o l u t i o n b e g a n to b e felt in u r b a n e n v i r o n m e n t s s o m e time after industry h a d b e g u n to mature. The urban environment and e x p e r i e n c e affected m u c h of the p o p u l a t i o n a n d n u r t u r e d seeds of a new world view. O f this view, a n d its effects on literature in the mid-19th c e n t u r y , R a y m o n d Williams has said: City experience was becoming so widespread and writers, disproportionately, were so deeply involved in it that there sccmcd little reality in any other mode of life; all sources of perception seemed to begin and end in the city, and if there was anything beyond it, it was also beyond life." F a s c i n a t i o n with the new u r b a n env i r o n m e n t was clearly registered in the mid-19th c e n t u r y by artists of all types. Williams outlines d e v e l o p m e n t s in literature which t r a n s f o r m e d m o d e s of p e r c e p t i o n : not surprisingly, alienation was a p r i m a r y t h e m e . In parallel with the distancing of p r o d u c e r from p r o d u c t , and the division of l a b o u r , writers b e g a n to s e p a r a t e t h e m s e l v e s not only from the physical e n v i r o n m c n t but also from others. In 1844 E n g e l s w r o t e of the city, ' T h e dissolu-
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3Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1971. '=Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, and other Essays, Phaidon, New York, 1965. S/bid. 60p cit, Ref 2, pp 145-159. 7~bid, p 239. 8Virginia Woolf. quoted in op cit, Ref 2, p 242. 9james Joyce, Ulysses, Random House, New York, 1961. mOp cit, Ref 2, p 246. llbid, pp 243-247.
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tion of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost e x t r e m e s ' ) The possibility of a collective urban consciousness was thwarted by a frenzied subjectivity. Much of the writing connected with urbanism in this period revealed a disillusionment with the new environment. Not until Baudelaire exalted in bathing himself in the crowd do we find optimism about urban existence. For Baudelaire the city was a "spree of vitality', an instantaneous and transitory world of 'feverish joys'. Isolation and loss of connection were the conditions of a 'new and lively perccption'.4 Baudelairc has been considered by many to be, as the title of his own essay of 1865 suggests, the original "painter of modern life', s Baudelairc encouraged artists to throw themselves into the vibrant Parisian life, to witness the contrasts and conflicts intensified by Haussmann's boulevards, which cut open and exposed parts of the city previously hidden from view. According to Williams, these urban contrasts wcrc an allegory of capitalism; they showed the great inner contradictions that manifested themselves in the moving chaos of the city, where many rational units made up an anarchic whole. This is the "modernism in the city that inspires and enforces the modernization of citizens' souls'J' For Baudehfire such experiences were an aesthetic springboard. The poet's call to action was finally taken up by artists of all kinds at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the early 20th century. Impressionism e m b o d i e d a new subjectivity that flirted with science. Later cubofuturism sought a purely nonrepresentational manifestation of the modern spirit. In literature T.S. Eliot and Virginia W o o l f described urban experiences that Williams summarizcs: Struggle, mdiffcrcncc, loss of meaning, loss of purpose - features of 19th century social experience and of a common interprctation of the new scientific world view have found, in the city, a habitation and a home. For the city is not only, in this vision, a h)rrn of modern life; it is the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness. 7
Virginia W o o l f aesthetically experienced 'the discontinuity, and the atomism of the city' in 1928. She wrote: "after twenty minutes the body and the mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and death itself', s l l e r e , a new technological p h e n o m e n o n , the automobile, provides a m e t a p h o r for the urban environment. A n o t h e r d e v e l o p m e n t in urban perception is created by James Joyce in Ulysses, where the traditional authorial wfice is eschewed altogether in favour of an 'intense and fragmentary subjectivity . . . of a single and racing consciousness'. "lie walked along the curbstone. Stream of life . . . cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too; other coming on, passing on'. '~ This is an experience in which 'isolation and projection of significant objects is a consequence of the separated subjectivity of the observer', m Interestingly, in Joyce we c o m e full circle back to Engcls's desire for a closer collective consciousness. Williams asserts that after all 'in and through the intense subjectivities, a metaphysical or psychological community is assumed, and characteristically, if only in abstract structures, it is universal . . . A collective consciousness which could see not only individuals but also their altered and altering relationships'. II The urban environment became, as Williams notes, the e m b o d i m e n t of a new consciousncss. The notion of film montage was thus born of the new perception of reality which began to e m e r g e in this period. The painting and sculpture of the period that tried to represent the new p h c n o m c n o l o g y was coolly rcceivcd. ('ubo-futurism was the first art form to e m b o d y a new conception of space-time reality: its dissolution of perspective opens the d o o r to a wider range of subjective interpretation, and suggests that different experiences may occur simultaneously. Two years after the first cubist exhibition of 1911 in Paris, the Russian constructivists originated a new, non-naturalistic art fl)rm. The
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Special series on urban design constructivists were, p e r h a p s , the artists most c o n c e r n e d with c r e a t i n g an art form which reflected the possibilities of the new technological society. In l i t e r a t u r e , Joycc c a m e as close as the m e d i u m would allow to formally e x p r e s s i n g new ideas a b o u t space a n d time. T h e i n v e n t i o n of film a n d c i n e m a t i c synthesis offered f u r t h e r new possibilities of sense p e r c e p t i o n , in an e x p e r i m e n t a l m e d i u m . O f film, R o b e r t M a l l e t - S t e v e n s writes in L'Art Cindrnatographique of 1929: Cinema was the only true artistic medium of the modern age, hence, the single contemporary art form . . . Film's ability to convincingly portray the unreal and to transcend the conventional dramatic unities, particularly time . . . ~
~2aobert Mallet-Stevens, quoted from 'Monumentality and the rue MalletStevens', in Richard Becherer, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, March 1981, p 53. ~3peler Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1969, p 21. ~4Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1949. ~Op cit, Ref 13, p 48. 16Ibid.
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T h e c i n e m a t i c e x p e r i e n c e was the full e x p r e s s i o n of the Zeitgeist. Film montage way to b e c o m e the "perfect marriage' of art a n d science. It was a m o d e of p r o d u c t i o n which e m b r a c e d new technology. It m a d e differing sense p e r c e p t i o n s s i m u l t a n e o u s , thus altering o u r n o t i o n of space a n d time. T h r o u g h the m o n t a g e t e c h n i q u e the film artist could synthesize a multiplicity of c o n t r a s t i n g images a n d so satisfy the new p h e n o m c n o l o g y , which had b e e n in turn c r e a t e d by the new u r b a n environment. T h a t film m o n t a g e t h e o r y was dev e l o p e d by a Russian s h o u l d c o m e as no surprise to t h o s e familiar with the constructivist credo. W h i l e we c a n n o t a s s u m e that Eisenstein was reacting to his own p e r s o n a l u r b a n sensibilities this h y p o t h e s i s would be especially q u e s t i o n a b l e in a p r e d o m i n a n t l y rural Russia - we can bc sure that the spirit of industrialized u r b a n i s m a n d the new p h e n o m e n o l o g y had p e r v a d e d most a v a n t g a r d e W e s t e r n society. T h e Soviet a t t i t u d e t o w a r d artistic p r o d u c t i o n in the years i m m e d i a t e l y after the Bolshevik r e v o l u t i o n was to e n c o u r a g e the political, r e v o l u t i o n a r y , a n d scientific. E i s e n s t e i n was heavily influenced by the constructivists a n d the new t h e o r y of a n t i n a t u r a l i s t i c t h e a t r e p r o p o s e d by the playwright Vsew~lod M e y c r h o l d . This was theatrical a n t i t r a d i t i o n which rebelled against the then p o p u l a r naturalistic and psychologistic theatre of Stanislavsky. 13 In r e s p o n s e to this Eisenstein de-
v e l o p e d a synthetic t h e o r y of perception in film m o n t a g e . In his early p e r i o d (1920-30) he p r o d u c e d his two most f a m o u s films: Strike (1924) a n d the Battleship Potemkin (1925) a n d a s e m i n a l treatise o n film t h e o r y , Film Form (1929). T h e art of film m o n t a g e lies in the creative a r r a n g e m e n t of shots, or frames, of film in a certain s e q u e n c e . It is t h r o u g h this a r r a n g e m e n t that the film takes on a m e a n i n g b e y o n d what would be d e r i v e d from the simple, naturalistic, r e c o r d i n g of an e v e n t on film. By editing a sequence the film technician can insert f r a m e s t a k e n fit different times and j u x t a p o s e images synchronically. In this sense - a n d this especially relates it to the new p h e n o m e n o l o g y - film m o n t a g e was b a s e d on a dialectic principle. Eisenstein c o n s i d e r e d individual shots as cells find w o r k e d t o w a r d g r o u p i n g t h e m in "molecules of montage'. T h e n o t i o n of dialectical composition, was, of course, c o m p a t i b l e with the political climate. E i s e n s t e i n enj o y e d reading l , e n i n ' s l'hilosophical Notebooks and, interestingly, The Dialectics o f Nature, by Engels. In Fihn Form Eisenstcin writes: ' A c c o r d i n g to M a r x a n d Engels the dialectic system is only the conscious r e p r o d u c t i o n of the dialectic course ( s u b s t a n c e ) of the e x t e r n a l e v e n t s of the world'. ~4 O n e w o n d e r s w h e t h e r E i s e n s t e i n himself is not rationalizing his o w n t h e o r i e s of sense p e r c e p t i o n here. Eiscnstcin referred to the dialectic process in film as collision: ' f r o m the collision of two given factors arises a c o n c e p t . . . so m o n t a g e is conflict. As the basis of every art is conflict'. ~5 A s P e t e r Wollen c h a r a c t e r i z e s it, "This was a simple physiological a p p r o a c h ; conflict, on various levels a n d d i m e n s i o n s , on the screen excited e m o t i o n s in the s p e c t a t o r ' , t~' Eisenstein c r e a t e d a formal s t r u c t u r e for his t e c h n i q u e on five levels: metric, r h y t h m i c , tonal, overtonal a n d intellectual. T h e s e involve a t e c h n i q u e of c o m p o s i n g frames in s e q u e n c e to suggest different types of r h y t h m s . Intellectual m o n t a g e revolves the j u x t a p o s i t i o n of images which will be recognized by the viewer find t h e n synthesized to create a new reality. As an art, the process of film mort-
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Special series on urban design tage is unique, because it is not complete until it has becn viewed. It operates so that. in a surprising fashion unknown to earlier periods, a sharp contrast results between the brief span of time occupied by the exterior event and the dreamlike wealth of a process of eonsciousncss which transverses the whole subjective universe [of thc v i e w e r ] . . , thc cxtcrior cvcnts havc lost their hcgcmony, they scrvc to release and interprct inncr events, j7
~71an Mills, The Cinematic Synthesis, Centre for Study of Educational Communication and Media, Victoria, Australia, 1977, pl.
~Sergei Eisenstein, 'Piranesi, or the fluidity of form', and 'The Gothic', in Oppositions, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977. ~gcolin Rowe, Collage City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978, p 92• 2°George Baird, Lectures, Autumn 1986, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
211bid.
22Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965, p 194•
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This, thcn, is a process of cinematic synthesis which has no precedent in other art forms. It recalls the transcendental subjectivity of Joyce but, unlikc the written word, which is a record of the author's subjective expcricnce, film images arc synthcsized purely subjectively by the viewcr. The beauty of the process is that it is only complete when it is viewed and not before. The film, vicwcd, becomes an abstract union of thc filmed object, thc juxtaposition of these images by the film maker, and the synthesizing viewcr. The tcchniqucs used in film montage wcre e m b r a c e d by many other arts of thc period, including architecture. The dialectic in architecture is a subject of which much can bc said. A dialectic in architecturc certainly prc-dated Eisenstcin's montage theory: consider, for cxamplc, the vast assemblage, or collage, of Hadrian's villa, or Piranesi's fantasies. Eiscnstein himself analysed various artists whom he believed had used a montage method. Years after hc wrote Filnt Form, hc wrote unpublished essays, "The Gothic', on the montage of the painter El Greco and others, and 'Piranesi, or the fluidity of form', in which he provides a detailed analysis of one of the ('arcere. Eisens t e i n s analysis certainly has some validity, but it is also apparent that he is now actively seeking historical precedents for his montage theory. TM Conflict, contradiction and paradox certainly appear to many to be obvious characterizations of the human condition. But there have been some who have argued for a singularity of existence. Colin Rowe humorously describes the situation in his book Collage ('itv: [l'tlere are] . . . types of two psychological oricntations and temperaments, tile ouc, the hedgehog, concerned with the primacy
of the single idea and the otilcr, thc fox, preoccupicd with multiplicity of stimulus: and the great ones of the earth divide fairly cqually: Plat(), Dante, Dostcocvsky, Proust, arc, needless to say, l ledgehogs; Aristotle, Shakespcar. Pt.stlkin, Joyce are foxes, t,) Rowe continues to note that there are plenty of hedgehogs in architecture, e.g. Mies, Gropius, Meyer. but few foxes, l,e Corbusier combines the two. Some attempts to embrace dialectical montage in architecture at the beginning of the century operated through the tcehniques of Dadaism and surrealism. These are techniques which, through intellectual montage, set up, and sometimcs resolve, contrasts and conflicts within the work. The most visible advocate of such a technique was l,e Corbusicr who integrated, in a way similar to Duchamp, the concepts of the 'object type', the "ideal type', and the objet trout,~ ~ into his new architectural aesthetic. The dialectic involved in such a technique relies on the ordinary everyday quality of the Sachlichkeit object, the object type inserted in an architcctural environment where it would not ordinarily be found. In such a situation the object type becomes the ideal object, and in turn, because of its Suchlichkeit qualities, appears as an objet trou~;. 2) All of this operates in the observer's mind and would thus bc considered by Eisenstein a type of intellectual montage. Le Corbusier achieved this in the Pavillion I)'Esprit Nouveau (1925), Villa Stein (1927), Salon d ' A u t o m n e (1929), and most poigniantly in the Bcstegui Pcnthouse ( 1 9 3 0 - 3 1 ) w h e r e the contrasts between idealized furniture, a roof of grass, and the city scape of Paris are st) severe that they verge on a surrealism which creates some • ")l kind of modernist umty.- This allows the viewer the same type of objectified transcendental subjectivity that Joycc represents. Importantly, for the purposeful goals of Eisenstein and the Neue Sachlichkeit, this has a deliberate function. As Dali said in 1929: Surrealism is tile systematization of confusion. Surrealism appears to create an order, but tile purpose of this is to rcnder the idea of system suspect by association. Surrealisln is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles liulitins our vision. 2-"
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Special series on urban design More recently the dialectical technique can be seen in the work of Alvar Aalto. Although very much younger he has much in common with Eisenstein. The work of no other 20thcentury architect has deserved the term heterotopia, which Demetri Poryphyrios uses for him. Poryphyrios is referring here to Aalto's ordering sensibility as governed by discriminario, an investigation of difference, and convenientia, the adjacency of dissimilar things. Ileterotopia never commemorates the transition inherent in the joint, never establishes bonds, never duplicates appearances, never remembers the distant glance of composition, never maps out the itinerary of the visitor in hierarchical routes or guiding strides. In its aphasic silence, it commemorates the glittering singularity of the parts and stitches them together in the manner of Borgcs" Chinese encyclopaedist: m a mute and heterochtc symbK~s~s."
23Demetri Poryphyrios, Sources of Modern Eclecticism, St Martin's Press, London. 1982, p 4. 24Andres Duany, 'Principles in the architecture of Alvar Aalto', Harvard Architectural Review, Vol V, p 105. 25David Gosling and Barry Maitland, Concepts of Urban Design, Academy Editions/ St Martin's Press, New York, 1984, p 43. 26Donald Appleyard, K. Lynch and J.R. Myer, The View From the Road, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1964• 2eGordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1971. 28Gordon Cullen, A Town called Alcan, study for Alcan Industries 1964. Illustration as shown in op cit, Ref 25, p 49. Gosling devotes a section of his book to those ideas borrowed from arts and science for representation of urban models. 290p cit, Ref 25, Gosling, pp 33-34.
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What makes this significant in relation to Eisenstein is that while Aalto was long misunderstood and seen its lacking in logical method, we now see that his buildings did in fact contain a 'consciously rational ordering gesture'. For those who want a more analytical view of his work see the writing of Andres Duany who says that "Aalto's designs seem to inw~lve a dialectical process which integrates mutually contradictory concepts into comprehensive synthests. " " -~'~ While Aalto's political aims arc less overt, his method of fashioning an architecture that will represent the new sensibility shows some similarities to the methods of Eisenstein's montage theory. The lessons of Eisenstein, the dialectic, and the montage method of representation, have not been neglected by urban designers. Numerous graphic techniques have been available to those who have exposed the heterotopic vision of urban structure. Some continued with the media of Eisenstein, in photography and film. Gyorgy Kepes constructed visual experiences in which "very extended, or very compressed, sequences could bc made legible and continuous by the use of accelerated or decelerated film .-- Donald Appleyard built realistic scale models of urban and suburban environments and made se-
quences of photos at ground level to approximate visual experience. His book The View from the Road of 1964 documents his experiments. 2~' Arrangement in sequence of different views allows a synthetic understanding of movement. Appleyard went further to develop a graphic shorthand notation for his findings, much as Kevin Lynch had done before him. In The Concise Townscape of 1971 Gordon Cullen advocated depiction and arrangement of sequential views and analytical notation along the lines of Lynch and Applcyard. 27 Cullen's beautifully drawn sequences of a proposed new town of Lhmtrisant, Wales came complete with a film strip as a framing device. 2s The urban design graphic techniques of Philip Thiel, working at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1950s, owe much to Eisenstein (as Gosling notes). Thicl's efforts were directed at allowing the fixedpoint view to represent motion. According to Gosling, Thicl's techniques were explicit on that point. •
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•
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Modification of linear perspective by the use of multiple vanishing points and horizon lines, in which a plurality of observation points was equivalent to movement in space. Transparency of overhtpping forms to provide simultaneous representation of more than one point of view. Reflections and mirroring, alone or in conjunction with transparency. Rotations of orthographic projections, used by geometers, primitives and cubists. Simultaneous presentations of separate representations of successive events. 2'~
As a method for dealing with representation on paper Gosling notes that these techniques were commonly used in the unlikely form of the comic strip. This fact is not lost on the proponents of this media, who claim their origin in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Italian group Superstudio used a comic strip format for their work Cinque Storie Del Superstudio of 1972. In this, blocks of text accompany images to
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3°lbid, p 140; Casabella, No 367, 1972, pp 15-26. 3~Op cit, Ref 28, Gosling, p 113. 3=Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, St Martin's Press, New York, 1978. 33Gosling discusses work at MIT on multimedJa projects which use computers to call up previously filed photographic images of sequences and routes through the city in response to the operator's chosen path: op cit, Ref 25, p 127. 34John Decker and Francis Russell, 'Convention and structure in urban modeling for intelligent systems in urban design', Proceedings from the 22nd annual Pittsburgh conference on Modeling and Simulation, University of Pittsburgh, 1991; Ibrahim Zeid, CAD~CAM Theory and Practise, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991; James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Press, New York, 1987. 35Walter Benjamin 'The artist in the age of mechanical reproduction', Film Theory and Cribcism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985, p 679.
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describe their utopian "Supersurface an alternative model of life on earth'. 3° In his own work Gosling has advocated the use of comic strip techniques both for analysis and for the design of urban environments, t lis study of the Blackpool fun fair with John Ferguson (1982) makes explicit use of both sequential and simultaneous views of rollercoaster riders. 3~ Bernard Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts of 1978 contains groupings not of sequential views, but of various photographic images and diagrams organized around a narrative describing a murder in the city. 32 Multimedia offers a new development in these techniques. Computer aided design can create threedimensional models with imagery generated by the traditional sequential movement through the model. Photorealistic animations can quickly and easily be created in this synthetic environment. Relational databases within computer systems allow simultaneous access to two- and threedimensional imagery of computer models, plans and photographs of existing conditions, and other nonphysical data for immediate display. The computer offers the operator instant and variable montage arrange-
ments. Depending on the construction of the computer model operators also have the opportunity to view previously invisible urban data as 'scientific visualizations'. In these constructs the computer can model physical and nonphysical data in animated threedimensional terms of the type commonly used in scientific fields to render subatomic models. 34 Methods of representing the urban experience will evolve as the city itself evolves. It is unlikely that any one single form of representation will ever evoke all the elusive facets of urbanism. Eisenstein's montage method was one platform for the development of new techniques for representing the city; some of its principles were derived from the city itself. As the development of representation is dependent on changes in sense perception, or phenomenology, the problem of urban experience is inextricably complex. As Walter Benjamin writes, During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. 3~
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New ways of city viewing Francis Russell
This paper investigates the emergence of the film montage method as a new form of urban representation during the early part of the 20th century. Interest is focused on the development of film montage as a vehicle for a new modem consciousness which has evolved out of a rapidly changing urban environment. Montage is analysed as a revolutionary way of perceiving the city and comparable examples from our time are sought in urban design representations. Francis Russell is Research Associate, Center for Urban Design, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
~Hannes Meyer, 'The New World', in Claude Schmaidt, Hannes Meyer, Alec Tiranti Lid, 1965 (article first published 1926). 2Raymond Williams, 'Eisenstein's aesthetic', City and Country, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1973, p 235. In this book Williams compiled an extensive survey of precedents in literature relating to the urban experience.
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Motor cars dash along our streets. On a traffic island in the Champs Elysdes from 6 to 8 pm there rages round one metrol.×~litan dynamicism at its most strident. Fords and Rolls Royce have burst open the core of the town, obliterating distance and effacing the boundaries between town and country. Aircraft slip through the air: Fokker and Farman widen our range of movement and the distance between us and the earth: they disregard national frontiers and bring nation closer to nation. Illuminated sign.~ twinkle, loud-speakers screech, postors advertise, display windows shine forth. The simultaneity of events enormously extends our concept of space and time, it enriches our life. We live faster and therefore longer . . . The revolution in our attitude of mind to the reorganization of our world calls for a change in our media of expression. M e y e r was certainly not the first to suggest that a search for manifestations of a new p h e n o m e n o l o g y was c o m i n g into its own at the b e g i n n i n g of this century. But he was o n e of the m o r e fervent a d v o c a t e s of a new form of r e p r e s e n t a t i o n for a world view delivered by the Industrial R e v o l u t i o n of a l m o s t a c e n t u r y before. O n e of the most r e v o l u t i o n a r y of these f o r m s was the m o n t a g e m e t h o d of c i n e m a t i c representation developed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is the p u r p o s e of this p a p e r to e x a m i n e the inception of this art, to c o n s i d e r the cross cultural relat i o n s h i p that such a new t e c h n i q u e had with the o t h e r arts a n d its i m p o r t a n c e as a m o d e l for describing the perceptions of the t h e n n o v e l m o d e r n u r b a n experience. T h e p r o b l e m of u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d expressing individual p e r c e p t i o n s of the m o d e r n city has vexed u r b a n designers for decades. Few, if any, graphic t e c h n i q u e s h a v e a d e q u a t e l y
d e s c r i b e d the total u r b a n e x p e r i e n c e . T h e m o n t a g e m e t h o d has b e e n used f r e q u e n t l y by u r b a n designers to repr e s e n t the complexity of u r b a n perceptions, o n paper, in film, a n d in electronic media. Necessary to t h e use of this t e c h n i q u e is an u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h a t its suitability for describing the city is a p r o d u c t of its inception in the early years of m o d e r n u r b a n i s m . T h e transformation of greater society d u r i n g the Industrial R e v o l u t i o n did not occur only at the mill gates. T h e true fruits of the Industrial R e v o l u t i o n b e g a n to b e felt in u r b a n e n v i r o n m e n t s s o m e time after industry h a d b e g u n to mature. The urban environment and e x p e r i e n c e affected m u c h of the p o p u l a t i o n a n d n u r t u r e d seeds of a new world view. O f this view, a n d its effects on literature in the mid-19th c e n t u r y , R a y m o n d Williams has said: City experience was becoming so widespread and writers, disproportionately, were so deeply involved in it that there sccmcd little reality in any other mode of life; all sources of perception seemed to begin and end in the city, and if there was anything beyond it, it was also beyond life." F a s c i n a t i o n with the new u r b a n env i r o n m e n t was clearly registered in the mid-19th c e n t u r y by artists of all types. Williams outlines d e v e l o p m e n t s in literature which t r a n s f o r m e d m o d e s of p e r c e p t i o n : not surprisingly, alienation was a p r i m a r y t h e m e . In parallel with the distancing of p r o d u c e r from p r o d u c t , and the division of l a b o u r , writers b e g a n to s e p a r a t e t h e m s e l v e s not only from the physical e n v i r o n m c n t but also from others. In 1844 E n g e l s w r o t e of the city, ' T h e dissolu-
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3Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1971. '=Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, and other Essays, Phaidon, New York, 1965. S/bid. 60p cit, Ref 2, pp 145-159. 7~bid, p 239. 8Virginia Woolf. quoted in op cit, Ref 2, p 242. 9james Joyce, Ulysses, Random House, New York, 1961. mOp cit, Ref 2, p 246. llbid, pp 243-247.
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tion of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost e x t r e m e s ' ) The possibility of a collective urban consciousness was thwarted by a frenzied subjectivity. Much of the writing connected with urbanism in this period revealed a disillusionment with the new environment. Not until Baudelaire exalted in bathing himself in the crowd do we find optimism about urban existence. For Baudelaire the city was a "spree of vitality', an instantaneous and transitory world of 'feverish joys'. Isolation and loss of connection were the conditions of a 'new and lively perccption'.4 Baudelairc has been considered by many to be, as the title of his own essay of 1865 suggests, the original "painter of modern life', s Baudelairc encouraged artists to throw themselves into the vibrant Parisian life, to witness the contrasts and conflicts intensified by Haussmann's boulevards, which cut open and exposed parts of the city previously hidden from view. According to Williams, these urban contrasts wcrc an allegory of capitalism; they showed the great inner contradictions that manifested themselves in the moving chaos of the city, where many rational units made up an anarchic whole. This is the "modernism in the city that inspires and enforces the modernization of citizens' souls'J' For Baudehfire such experiences were an aesthetic springboard. The poet's call to action was finally taken up by artists of all kinds at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the early 20th century. Impressionism e m b o d i e d a new subjectivity that flirted with science. Later cubofuturism sought a purely nonrepresentational manifestation of the modern spirit. In literature T.S. Eliot and Virginia W o o l f described urban experiences that Williams summarizcs: Struggle, mdiffcrcncc, loss of meaning, loss of purpose - features of 19th century social experience and of a common interprctation of the new scientific world view have found, in the city, a habitation and a home. For the city is not only, in this vision, a h)rrn of modern life; it is the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness. 7
Virginia W o o l f aesthetically experienced 'the discontinuity, and the atomism of the city' in 1928. She wrote: "after twenty minutes the body and the mind were like scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack and, indeed, the process of motoring fast out of London so much resembles the chopping up small of identity which precedes unconsciousness and death itself', s l l e r e , a new technological p h e n o m e n o n , the automobile, provides a m e t a p h o r for the urban environment. A n o t h e r d e v e l o p m e n t in urban perception is created by James Joyce in Ulysses, where the traditional authorial wfice is eschewed altogether in favour of an 'intense and fragmentary subjectivity . . . of a single and racing consciousness'. "lie walked along the curbstone. Stream of life . . . cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too; other coming on, passing on'. '~ This is an experience in which 'isolation and projection of significant objects is a consequence of the separated subjectivity of the observer', m Interestingly, in Joyce we c o m e full circle back to Engcls's desire for a closer collective consciousness. Williams asserts that after all 'in and through the intense subjectivities, a metaphysical or psychological community is assumed, and characteristically, if only in abstract structures, it is universal . . . A collective consciousness which could see not only individuals but also their altered and altering relationships'. II The urban environment became, as Williams notes, the e m b o d i m e n t of a new consciousncss. The notion of film montage was thus born of the new perception of reality which began to e m e r g e in this period. The painting and sculpture of the period that tried to represent the new p h c n o m c n o l o g y was coolly rcceivcd. ('ubo-futurism was the first art form to e m b o d y a new conception of space-time reality: its dissolution of perspective opens the d o o r to a wider range of subjective interpretation, and suggests that different experiences may occur simultaneously. Two years after the first cubist exhibition of 1911 in Paris, the Russian constructivists originated a new, non-naturalistic art fl)rm. The
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Special series on urban design constructivists were, p e r h a p s , the artists most c o n c e r n e d with c r e a t i n g an art form which reflected the possibilities of the new technological society. In l i t e r a t u r e , Joycc c a m e as close as the m e d i u m would allow to formally e x p r e s s i n g new ideas a b o u t space a n d time. T h e i n v e n t i o n of film a n d c i n e m a t i c synthesis offered f u r t h e r new possibilities of sense p e r c e p t i o n , in an e x p e r i m e n t a l m e d i u m . O f film, R o b e r t M a l l e t - S t e v e n s writes in L'Art Cindrnatographique of 1929: Cinema was the only true artistic medium of the modern age, hence, the single contemporary art form . . . Film's ability to convincingly portray the unreal and to transcend the conventional dramatic unities, particularly time . . . ~
~2aobert Mallet-Stevens, quoted from 'Monumentality and the rue MalletStevens', in Richard Becherer, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, March 1981, p 53. ~3peler Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1969, p 21. ~4Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1949. ~Op cit, Ref 13, p 48. 16Ibid.
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T h e c i n e m a t i c e x p e r i e n c e was the full e x p r e s s i o n of the Zeitgeist. Film montage way to b e c o m e the "perfect marriage' of art a n d science. It was a m o d e of p r o d u c t i o n which e m b r a c e d new technology. It m a d e differing sense p e r c e p t i o n s s i m u l t a n e o u s , thus altering o u r n o t i o n of space a n d time. T h r o u g h the m o n t a g e t e c h n i q u e the film artist could synthesize a multiplicity of c o n t r a s t i n g images a n d so satisfy the new p h e n o m c n o l o g y , which had b e e n in turn c r e a t e d by the new u r b a n environment. T h a t film m o n t a g e t h e o r y was dev e l o p e d by a Russian s h o u l d c o m e as no surprise to t h o s e familiar with the constructivist credo. W h i l e we c a n n o t a s s u m e that Eisenstein was reacting to his own p e r s o n a l u r b a n sensibilities this h y p o t h e s i s would be especially q u e s t i o n a b l e in a p r e d o m i n a n t l y rural Russia - we can bc sure that the spirit of industrialized u r b a n i s m a n d the new p h e n o m e n o l o g y had p e r v a d e d most a v a n t g a r d e W e s t e r n society. T h e Soviet a t t i t u d e t o w a r d artistic p r o d u c t i o n in the years i m m e d i a t e l y after the Bolshevik r e v o l u t i o n was to e n c o u r a g e the political, r e v o l u t i o n a r y , a n d scientific. E i s e n s t e i n was heavily influenced by the constructivists a n d the new t h e o r y of a n t i n a t u r a l i s t i c t h e a t r e p r o p o s e d by the playwright Vsew~lod M e y c r h o l d . This was theatrical a n t i t r a d i t i o n which rebelled against the then p o p u l a r naturalistic and psychologistic theatre of Stanislavsky. 13 In r e s p o n s e to this Eisenstein de-
v e l o p e d a synthetic t h e o r y of perception in film m o n t a g e . In his early p e r i o d (1920-30) he p r o d u c e d his two most f a m o u s films: Strike (1924) a n d the Battleship Potemkin (1925) a n d a s e m i n a l treatise o n film t h e o r y , Film Form (1929). T h e art of film m o n t a g e lies in the creative a r r a n g e m e n t of shots, or frames, of film in a certain s e q u e n c e . It is t h r o u g h this a r r a n g e m e n t that the film takes on a m e a n i n g b e y o n d what would be d e r i v e d from the simple, naturalistic, r e c o r d i n g of an e v e n t on film. By editing a sequence the film technician can insert f r a m e s t a k e n fit different times and j u x t a p o s e images synchronically. In this sense - a n d this especially relates it to the new p h e n o m e n o l o g y - film m o n t a g e was b a s e d on a dialectic principle. Eisenstein c o n s i d e r e d individual shots as cells find w o r k e d t o w a r d g r o u p i n g t h e m in "molecules of montage'. T h e n o t i o n of dialectical composition, was, of course, c o m p a t i b l e with the political climate. E i s e n s t e i n enj o y e d reading l , e n i n ' s l'hilosophical Notebooks and, interestingly, The Dialectics o f Nature, by Engels. In Fihn Form Eisenstcin writes: ' A c c o r d i n g to M a r x a n d Engels the dialectic system is only the conscious r e p r o d u c t i o n of the dialectic course ( s u b s t a n c e ) of the e x t e r n a l e v e n t s of the world'. ~4 O n e w o n d e r s w h e t h e r E i s e n s t e i n himself is not rationalizing his o w n t h e o r i e s of sense p e r c e p t i o n here. Eiscnstcin referred to the dialectic process in film as collision: ' f r o m the collision of two given factors arises a c o n c e p t . . . so m o n t a g e is conflict. As the basis of every art is conflict'. ~5 A s P e t e r Wollen c h a r a c t e r i z e s it, "This was a simple physiological a p p r o a c h ; conflict, on various levels a n d d i m e n s i o n s , on the screen excited e m o t i o n s in the s p e c t a t o r ' , t~' Eisenstein c r e a t e d a formal s t r u c t u r e for his t e c h n i q u e on five levels: metric, r h y t h m i c , tonal, overtonal a n d intellectual. T h e s e involve a t e c h n i q u e of c o m p o s i n g frames in s e q u e n c e to suggest different types of r h y t h m s . Intellectual m o n t a g e revolves the j u x t a p o s i t i o n of images which will be recognized by the viewer find t h e n synthesized to create a new reality. As an art, the process of film mort-
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Special series on urban design tage is unique, because it is not complete until it has becn viewed. It operates so that. in a surprising fashion unknown to earlier periods, a sharp contrast results between the brief span of time occupied by the exterior event and the dreamlike wealth of a process of eonsciousncss which transverses the whole subjective universe [of thc v i e w e r ] . . , thc cxtcrior cvcnts havc lost their hcgcmony, they scrvc to release and interprct inncr events, j7
~71an Mills, The Cinematic Synthesis, Centre for Study of Educational Communication and Media, Victoria, Australia, 1977, pl.
~Sergei Eisenstein, 'Piranesi, or the fluidity of form', and 'The Gothic', in Oppositions, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977. ~gcolin Rowe, Collage City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1978, p 92• 2°George Baird, Lectures, Autumn 1986, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
211bid.
22Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965, p 194•
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This, thcn, is a process of cinematic synthesis which has no precedent in other art forms. It recalls the transcendental subjectivity of Joyce but, unlikc the written word, which is a record of the author's subjective expcricnce, film images arc synthcsized purely subjectively by the viewcr. The beauty of the process is that it is only complete when it is viewed and not before. The film, vicwcd, becomes an abstract union of thc filmed object, thc juxtaposition of these images by the film maker, and the synthesizing viewcr. The tcchniqucs used in film montage wcre e m b r a c e d by many other arts of thc period, including architecture. The dialectic in architecture is a subject of which much can bc said. A dialectic in architecturc certainly prc-dated Eisenstcin's montage theory: consider, for cxamplc, the vast assemblage, or collage, of Hadrian's villa, or Piranesi's fantasies. Eiscnstein himself analysed various artists whom he believed had used a montage method. Years after hc wrote Filnt Form, hc wrote unpublished essays, "The Gothic', on the montage of the painter El Greco and others, and 'Piranesi, or the fluidity of form', in which he provides a detailed analysis of one of the ('arcere. Eisens t e i n s analysis certainly has some validity, but it is also apparent that he is now actively seeking historical precedents for his montage theory. TM Conflict, contradiction and paradox certainly appear to many to be obvious characterizations of the human condition. But there have been some who have argued for a singularity of existence. Colin Rowe humorously describes the situation in his book Collage ('itv: [l'tlere are] . . . types of two psychological oricntations and temperaments, tile ouc, the hedgehog, concerned with the primacy
of the single idea and the otilcr, thc fox, preoccupicd with multiplicity of stimulus: and the great ones of the earth divide fairly cqually: Plat(), Dante, Dostcocvsky, Proust, arc, needless to say, l ledgehogs; Aristotle, Shakespcar. Pt.stlkin, Joyce are foxes, t,) Rowe continues to note that there are plenty of hedgehogs in architecture, e.g. Mies, Gropius, Meyer. but few foxes, l,e Corbusier combines the two. Some attempts to embrace dialectical montage in architecture at the beginning of the century operated through the tcehniques of Dadaism and surrealism. These are techniques which, through intellectual montage, set up, and sometimcs resolve, contrasts and conflicts within the work. The most visible advocate of such a technique was l,e Corbusicr who integrated, in a way similar to Duchamp, the concepts of the 'object type', the "ideal type', and the objet trout,~ ~ into his new architectural aesthetic. The dialectic involved in such a technique relies on the ordinary everyday quality of the Sachlichkeit object, the object type inserted in an architcctural environment where it would not ordinarily be found. In such a situation the object type becomes the ideal object, and in turn, because of its Suchlichkeit qualities, appears as an objet trou~;. 2) All of this operates in the observer's mind and would thus bc considered by Eisenstein a type of intellectual montage. Le Corbusier achieved this in the Pavillion I)'Esprit Nouveau (1925), Villa Stein (1927), Salon d ' A u t o m n e (1929), and most poigniantly in the Bcstegui Pcnthouse ( 1 9 3 0 - 3 1 ) w h e r e the contrasts between idealized furniture, a roof of grass, and the city scape of Paris are st) severe that they verge on a surrealism which creates some • ")l kind of modernist umty.- This allows the viewer the same type of objectified transcendental subjectivity that Joycc represents. Importantly, for the purposeful goals of Eisenstein and the Neue Sachlichkeit, this has a deliberate function. As Dali said in 1929: Surrealism is tile systematization of confusion. Surrealism appears to create an order, but tile purpose of this is to rcnder the idea of system suspect by association. Surrealisln is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles liulitins our vision. 2-"
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Special series on urban design More recently the dialectical technique can be seen in the work of Alvar Aalto. Although very much younger he has much in common with Eisenstein. The work of no other 20thcentury architect has deserved the term heterotopia, which Demetri Poryphyrios uses for him. Poryphyrios is referring here to Aalto's ordering sensibility as governed by discriminario, an investigation of difference, and convenientia, the adjacency of dissimilar things. Ileterotopia never commemorates the transition inherent in the joint, never establishes bonds, never duplicates appearances, never remembers the distant glance of composition, never maps out the itinerary of the visitor in hierarchical routes or guiding strides. In its aphasic silence, it commemorates the glittering singularity of the parts and stitches them together in the manner of Borgcs" Chinese encyclopaedist: m a mute and heterochtc symbK~s~s."
23Demetri Poryphyrios, Sources of Modern Eclecticism, St Martin's Press, London. 1982, p 4. 24Andres Duany, 'Principles in the architecture of Alvar Aalto', Harvard Architectural Review, Vol V, p 105. 25David Gosling and Barry Maitland, Concepts of Urban Design, Academy Editions/ St Martin's Press, New York, 1984, p 43. 26Donald Appleyard, K. Lynch and J.R. Myer, The View From the Road, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1964• 2eGordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1971. 28Gordon Cullen, A Town called Alcan, study for Alcan Industries 1964. Illustration as shown in op cit, Ref 25, p 49. Gosling devotes a section of his book to those ideas borrowed from arts and science for representation of urban models. 290p cit, Ref 25, Gosling, pp 33-34.
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What makes this significant in relation to Eisenstein is that while Aalto was long misunderstood and seen its lacking in logical method, we now see that his buildings did in fact contain a 'consciously rational ordering gesture'. For those who want a more analytical view of his work see the writing of Andres Duany who says that "Aalto's designs seem to inw~lve a dialectical process which integrates mutually contradictory concepts into comprehensive synthests. " " -~'~ While Aalto's political aims arc less overt, his method of fashioning an architecture that will represent the new sensibility shows some similarities to the methods of Eisenstein's montage theory. The lessons of Eisenstein, the dialectic, and the montage method of representation, have not been neglected by urban designers. Numerous graphic techniques have been available to those who have exposed the heterotopic vision of urban structure. Some continued with the media of Eisenstein, in photography and film. Gyorgy Kepes constructed visual experiences in which "very extended, or very compressed, sequences could bc made legible and continuous by the use of accelerated or decelerated film .-- Donald Appleyard built realistic scale models of urban and suburban environments and made se-
quences of photos at ground level to approximate visual experience. His book The View from the Road of 1964 documents his experiments. 2~' Arrangement in sequence of different views allows a synthetic understanding of movement. Appleyard went further to develop a graphic shorthand notation for his findings, much as Kevin Lynch had done before him. In The Concise Townscape of 1971 Gordon Cullen advocated depiction and arrangement of sequential views and analytical notation along the lines of Lynch and Applcyard. 27 Cullen's beautifully drawn sequences of a proposed new town of Lhmtrisant, Wales came complete with a film strip as a framing device. 2s The urban design graphic techniques of Philip Thiel, working at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1950s, owe much to Eisenstein (as Gosling notes). Thicl's efforts were directed at allowing the fixedpoint view to represent motion. According to Gosling, Thicl's techniques were explicit on that point. •
•
•
•
•
Modification of linear perspective by the use of multiple vanishing points and horizon lines, in which a plurality of observation points was equivalent to movement in space. Transparency of overhtpping forms to provide simultaneous representation of more than one point of view. Reflections and mirroring, alone or in conjunction with transparency. Rotations of orthographic projections, used by geometers, primitives and cubists. Simultaneous presentations of separate representations of successive events. 2'~
As a method for dealing with representation on paper Gosling notes that these techniques were commonly used in the unlikely form of the comic strip. This fact is not lost on the proponents of this media, who claim their origin in the Bayeux Tapestry. The Italian group Superstudio used a comic strip format for their work Cinque Storie Del Superstudio of 1972. In this, blocks of text accompany images to
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3°lbid, p 140; Casabella, No 367, 1972, pp 15-26. 3~Op cit, Ref 28, Gosling, p 113. 3=Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, St Martin's Press, New York, 1978. 33Gosling discusses work at MIT on multimedJa projects which use computers to call up previously filed photographic images of sequences and routes through the city in response to the operator's chosen path: op cit, Ref 25, p 127. 34John Decker and Francis Russell, 'Convention and structure in urban modeling for intelligent systems in urban design', Proceedings from the 22nd annual Pittsburgh conference on Modeling and Simulation, University of Pittsburgh, 1991; Ibrahim Zeid, CAD~CAM Theory and Practise, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991; James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Press, New York, 1987. 35Walter Benjamin 'The artist in the age of mechanical reproduction', Film Theory and Cribcism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985, p 679.
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describe their utopian "Supersurface an alternative model of life on earth'. 3° In his own work Gosling has advocated the use of comic strip techniques both for analysis and for the design of urban environments, t lis study of the Blackpool fun fair with John Ferguson (1982) makes explicit use of both sequential and simultaneous views of rollercoaster riders. 3~ Bernard Tschumi's Manhattan Transcripts of 1978 contains groupings not of sequential views, but of various photographic images and diagrams organized around a narrative describing a murder in the city. 32 Multimedia offers a new development in these techniques. Computer aided design can create threedimensional models with imagery generated by the traditional sequential movement through the model. Photorealistic animations can quickly and easily be created in this synthetic environment. Relational databases within computer systems allow simultaneous access to two- and threedimensional imagery of computer models, plans and photographs of existing conditions, and other nonphysical data for immediate display. The computer offers the operator instant and variable montage arrange-
ments. Depending on the construction of the computer model operators also have the opportunity to view previously invisible urban data as 'scientific visualizations'. In these constructs the computer can model physical and nonphysical data in animated threedimensional terms of the type commonly used in scientific fields to render subatomic models. 34 Methods of representing the urban experience will evolve as the city itself evolves. It is unlikely that any one single form of representation will ever evoke all the elusive facets of urbanism. Eisenstein's montage method was one platform for the development of new techniques for representing the city; some of its principles were derived from the city itself. As the development of representation is dependent on changes in sense perception, or phenomenology, the problem of urban experience is inextricably complex. As Walter Benjamin writes, During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. 3~
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