Cinema, collage and city : re-animating the street

Since the early 20th century various technological frames have structured our

experience of the city. This thesis explores cinema’s propensity for the development

of visual languages that not only capture such experience, but that also become

activated as a means for the analysis and disputation of what we see and how we see

it. Beginning with an examination of montage in correlation with the modern

industrial city of the early 20th century, theorized by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1930s,

the thesis then looks at Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970) in relation to

the inter-media networks that would foreshadow our contemporary intermedia

environment; which is characterized by the transition from image-sequence to

sequence-image.

In culmination, exploring strategic correlations between cinema and city, the notion

of the sequence-image is activated as a way of framing the conceptualization of an

urban renewal project that will Re-animate an underutilized urban site in

downtown Ottawa.