Since its very beginnings, film has ultimately existed as a fragmented media. So many different influences must combine to form the completed work of art that it is hard not to consider every act of filmmaking as a chaotic collage of social conditions. As a platform deeply embedded in the modernist traditions of technological advancement and artistic experimentation, film has always had the inherent and uncanny ability to compress the spatial and temporal qualities of the city into a singular piece of work. Early recognition of this manipulation can be linked to architecture- trained film director Sergei Eisenstein and his theory of montage from the early twentieth century:

"The shot is by no means an element of the montage. The shot is a montage cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so, on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage .By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell- the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other.
By conflict. By collision."(Tafuri, 1987, 59)

In this theory, Eisenstein concisely asserts that rather than trying to expose the totality of a place through static representation and editing it quite suddenly became far more important, and poignant, to show a physical locations dynamic characteristics or its fluid thematic qualities. Considering the contradiction between the incredible spatial complexities and the increasing speed of the modern urban landscape, the predominant modernist meta-narrative of a universal model for living and the plethora of influences under which each director had to work, every act of filmmaking became a unique opportunity to expose or manipulate political, cultural, and economic issues. Combined with the pragmatic, technical issues of the director’s choice of camera angles, an actor’s positioning, lighting, costumes, scene timing etc., cinematography quickly evolved from a simple series of projections into a complex language system.