the cinematic rendering of unconscious space

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva

Olivia Keung 98-220 899 ARCH 646: Architecture and Film for Prof. Terri Meyer Boake University of Waterloo - Fall 2004

the cinematic rendering of unconscious space

the unconscious act of dwelling

The public realm of the modern city is a place of loneliness and alienation. In our contemporary culture, obsessed with speed and progress, connections between people have come to signify nothing more than a rational network of infrastructure. It is this relentless grid that organizes the modernist city, with its implications of order and regulation. Public spaces are inhabited in a way that demonstrates an ideal civic behaviour. The location of ones home, once inclusive of the collectivity of urban spaces that remained undened by concepts of public and private, has become an increasingly introverted notion; identity today is attached, instead, to ideas of ownership and possession, and this has crippled the freedom and exchange of dialogue that once characterized the public realm. The modernist city has extracted the act of dwelling from its streets; it has bound and dened the function and character of spaces so that only the extreme conditions of private and public can be consciously created. Beneath this consciousness, which is bound to the main street and the civic square, runs a ner grain of streets and spaces that struggles to exist: these territories have managed to evade the control of the public realm. They are difcult to dene: formed unintentionally and existing without a specic purpose, they are the interstitial spaces, or voids, that arise between the cracks of the citys programmed structure. As the antithesis to
Street scene, Diva

the ofcial city, they are the spaces of unconscious activity. In modernity, this realm is fragmented in space and time: it occurs in the space between buildings where all purposeful activity stops for one moment; in forgotten industrial landscapes, teetering perilously at the edge of hyper-intensication; in the deepest part of night, when each sound, smell, eeting vision accommodated in the shadows, brushes past the pedestrian at the pace of isolated incidents. Like the unconsciousness of the psyche, it lives in a precarious state of imbalance with the rational. The unconscious city is an unfullled potential that, at times, exists as nothing more than a state of mind. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin depicts a city where this struggle against rationality and order surfaces to the status of history. The arcades of nineteenth century Paris that he describes were spaces of collision and event, where idle conversation could unfold, bringing strangers together. Benjamin describes how interaction and awareness evolved into conspiracy, and then revolution: the arcades were the setting of the citys unofcial history and memory. Without a designated purpose, their subsequent inclusivity induced a freedom of interaction between individuals; these spaces accommodated a kind of social inhabitation that contemporary ideas of private and public do not approach. Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally wakeful, eternally agitated being thatexperiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collectivewalls with their Post No Bills are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the caf terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its householdthe street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses1. Benjamin wrote this at a time when
Diva Diva

Haussmanns reconstruction of the street system in Paris sought to break up these concentrations of unrest, by tearing open these spaces to the order of wide boulevards. His observation illustrates simultaneously the richness of inhabitation in such spaces, and their vulnerability to the imposed order that was already changing the city. Cinematic renderings of the modern city show that its construction has displaced this collective being. Jean-Luc Goddards vision of a future Paris in his lm Alphaville depicts a city that has succumbed entirely to its rational consciousness. Governed by the ideal of logic, this society seems more familiar than futuristic; it is reminiscent of a present day in which city planning responds largely to economic demands, while ignoring the complexity of less tangible needs of the emotional and psychological dimension. The architecture of Alphaville is one that seeks to obliterate the physical embodiment of memory: through the glossy surfaces and clean, sterile rooms, it is impossible to trace the citys history. This erasure of collective memory is linked to the destruction of personal identity, just as the governments outlawing of specic words, by removing them from the dictionary, leads to a repression of the need for self-expression. The characters that inhabit this city are displaced individuals who have forgotten their homes: in forgetting the existence of a past beyond their lives in Alphaville, their identities have also become dislocated: they can understand only their specic function within the framework of the present system. If the images of this sterile city of glass and concrete seem familiar, it is because Alphaville is a reection of the city that modernism has envisioned and built. Modernisms invention of a functional machine-architecture was a reaction against the presence of tradition and history which, at the
Street scene, Alphaville

time, seemed to pull architecture back from the progress that other industrial elds were enjoying. It was a rebellion against the hidden and disordered places where memory resides: a manifesto against notions of continuity. Like the psychological repression of the minds unconsciousness, this construction sprang from the urge to give denition to ambiguity, to clear away the uncertainty of the unknown. The house was raised off the ground, eliminating the cellar space; the roof and attic, lled with cobwebs and other forgotten objects, were removed and replaced with a healthy garden. Modernism sought to bring in light and open public spaces, nding safety in a realm where everything is obviously visible and comprehensible through its faade of glass and functional forms2. Yet, as Alphaville makes evident, this act of repression only pushes memory beneath the surface of the consciousness where irrational elements, such as emotion, persist. This is evident in the modern city as well, where spaces outside of the planned citys predictable and productive structure are avoided and ignored. Through this deliberate segregation, these spaces can only deteriorate. The unconscious city is at times alive in the ugly and aficted parts of the city; by pushing these spaces out of public use, the urban structure allows us to become disconnected from them. The marginal populations that nd sanctuary in these spaces are also bound to them metaphorically: as society pushes them out to inhabit this peripheral zone, it becomes possible to suppress the knowledge of their existence; this obscurity threatens identity. Ignorance gives license to an apathetic denial of empathy and compassion between strangers in the city. In an essay exploring the notion of interstitial spaces within the urban fabric, Ignasi de Sol-Morales writes: Architectures destiny has always been colonization, the

imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizabletransforming the uncivilized into the cultivated, the fallow into the productive, the void into the built3. This imposition is a reection of the insecurities of the urban rationale when facing the unknown. As a result, we have constructed cities in which public life has become regulated and conned to specic spaces and functions. Perhaps a better solution lies in a confrontation with the unconscious city, not with the intention of converting and assimilating it, but to develop a dialogue with it: a form of acknowledgement that allows for and even necessitates interchange between people and ideas. This interaction will reinstate the act of dwelling into the spaces of the city; the urban dweller will nd himself apart from the public body, amongst people who have become individuals to him.
architecture of Alphaville

the notion of bricolage in lm

This idea of the uidity of space and meaning, of a constant reinterpretation and reinhabitation in a way that allows the existing urban fabric to participate in a debate with the new, is the central argument of Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe in Collage City. Instead of seeking the nite composition of a comprehensive whole, their concept of bricolage advocates the juxtaposition of differing ideas within the urban fabric, allowing constructions to evolve as people inhabit them. The result is a preservation of memory, a way of accepting the signicance of history in everyday objects and spaces, like the Surrealist objet trouv. This history is not one of abstract ideals, but one that conveys the dynamics of inhabitation.

Bricolage is a continuous process that alters the nite. Collage

City promotes Rome as the quintessential place of bricolage:

its disordered imposition of ideas and physical objects creates a city that is accepting of the alteration of form and meaning that come with human occupation. At the same time, it also reveals the existence of this condition in every city: with the appropriate frame of mind, bricolage emerges as an inevitability of the act of dwelling that marks a place4. In the same way, cinema renders its own reinterpretation of a city through the specic images its creators choose to superimpose. Like the inevitable evolution of a city, lm changes the context of xed ideas or images: this process allows for a reevaluation of the image. If Godard has constructed the image of a city that resists the history of inhabitation in Alphaville, Jean-Jacques Beineixs lm Diva portrays an opposing vision in its exploitation of the unconscious identity of Paris. Both lms, though not explicitly set in Paris, have been constructed out of the citys existing fabric, and deliberately counter the traditional rendering of its cinematic image: a romantic city whose history is explicit in its monuments5. Beineixs Paris is instead a dark and fragmented city in which the higher society of music and art collide with one of criminality, whose unofcial history is written by piecing together the images of Paris forgotten and mundane spaces. Against architectures urge to make sense of the modern metropolis through limits and boundaries, Beineix nds Paris to be a city in which space and interaction between people are uid and dynamic. The city is a complex and emotional character in Diva. At times it is hostile and indifferent, weaving innocent by-passers into its underworld of criminality, only to become melancholy and empathetic in the next scene. Often, the camera shows the city in fragments: dark spaces punctuated by the momentary
Diva
warehouse, Diva

denition of light, the reection of activity caught in a mirror, or views from a moving car, in which buildings passing by become measurements of speed and time6. The images are experiential instead of comprehensive, dislocating the viewer but engaging him more directly. Beineix is often criticized for his explicit use of the ready-made images that already penetrate our lives through the ubiquitous presence of advertising or pop culture. Yet, this strategy is not simple imitation: Beineix evaluates these images, recognizing them as the lter through which mass culture understands the city7. His art lies in the way he pieces imagery together in a new context, presenting his audience with a city that is familiar but rarely noticed. Diva portrays the city with the novelty of the Situationists drive, in which one washes the brain of the conventional knowledge of the city, wandering through the streets in order to develop an experiential understanding of them. It is a sensorial reading of the city that encourages discovery. In one scene, Jules and Cynthia Hawkins walk through the streets of the city at dawn: through the uncanny images of monumental Paris, lonely and abandoned, the lm begins to uncover moments of sanctuary amidst the hostility of the city, even as the two characters seek to escape from it. It is
car chase through Paris, Diva car chase through Paris, Diva

Jules and Cynthia Hawkins walk through Paris at dawn, Diva

the rediscovery of a city from which the individual has been estranged: a reawakening that somehow occurs in a familiar place. The city seems to open up, its undened spaces provide a sudden relief from the tight and paranoid spaces of the structured city; the camera shots become wide and loose instead of fragmented. Beineixs Paris is that of Walter Benjamins neur, who also nds a dreamscape lying within the objective and functional city; by reading the city as an experience, it becomes personalized. The Paris of the neur is not Haussmanns triumphant order of boulevards, but a dark, miry, malodorous city, conned within its narrow lanesswarming with blind alleys, culs-desac, and mysterious passages, with labyrinths that lead you to the devil8. Once these passages are illegitimized, they become aficted and dangerous because of their dependence on instinct and unpredictability. Out of public view and usage, they are left to the marginal populations, who have no choice but to occupy what everyone else has abandoned. Because modern urban planning has become suspicious and neglectful of these spaces, the contemporary unconsciousness of the city is a starved version of its potential, alive in the interactive social inhabitation of Benjamins arcades. Through Diva, Beineix salvages what exists. The city he depicts runs beneath the boundaries that architecture delimits; it unsafe yet liberating; it is alive. The unconscious spaces of the city force the collision of people who would not normally meet: thieves, prostitutes, and drug trafckers who are pushed into this terrain vague but simultaneously nd shelter in its shadows; the police, authority of the ofcial city who descends to this criminal realm to become its chief; and the higher classes of society that are represented in the lm through opera and music. Jules involvement in the police ofcer Sapportas prostitution ring, and the unfolding of its consequences, happen
Jules and Cynthia Hawkins, Diva

as a result of these accidental collisions. He is pulled in as a victim of the indifference of a metropolis full of strangers who see him as a dangerous criminal: their lives move at such a pace that they fail to recognize his aspirations outside of his illegal activity, which are driven by the combination of poverty and a passion for music, and not material greed9. Yet, even Jules is a threat to the ofcial structure of the city. He characterizes Georg Simmels metropolitan stranger, who has successfully invaded and settled into the modern city, simply because of its explosion in scale and population. This stranger threatens the implicit order of the city; his potential mobility creates unease within established society because it carries implications of his potential criminality; whereas the stranger of the past moved on after his business was nished, that of the modern city nds comfort in his anonymity within the dense crowd. It is this anonymity that causes citizens to treat everyone with a cautious indifference10. Anthony Vidler describes this phenomenon in archetypal terms as the guerilla warfare of the tribe, operating in the interstices of the settled community11. It is not a fear of something that exists, but a paranoia of possibility, of the unknown. When Nadia, the prostitute, emerges from the subway, in ight from Sapportas enslavement, her obvious vulnerability and desperation seems unnoticed amongst the uniformity of the crowd, marching mechanically in one direction past her. She is a victim of this generalized hostility towards the unknown. The stranger lacks the usual established connections of kinship, locality, and occupation: he may be attached to a group but remains an outsider at the same time because his past, outside of the group, can never be fully known. Jules life forces a reconsideration of conventional denitions of home as a permanent location. He lives in an abandoned garage:
Nadia at subway, Diva Nadia at subway, Diva

Jules loft, Diva

his position in the city is impermanent. He adopts the space and even the clutter that its owner has left behind; more importantly, he adopts the stories that come with the loft, while his own identity remains relatively anonymous. His own belongings are few, mainly consisting of his recording equipment, which remain as oating objects within the space. Gorodish exemplies the nomad even more than Jules. His loft is made up mainly of empty space, darkness pierced through with precise and articial light, emphasizing the oddity of the few objects that have been imported into the room: the footed bathtub, the wave-machine, the vinatage furniture. Because of his intentional involvement in criminal activity and the nancial gain it brings him, he is ready to move on at any minute: when Jules calls him for help after he is shot, Gorodishs reaction is smooth and practised. He is anonymous, a character without a past12. Even his relationship with Alba provides no information: she tells Jules that he picked her up one day in his car. Gorodish is comfortable in the unconscious spaces of the city: the hidden alleys of secret activity, and the undened peripheral ruins of an industrial wasteland.
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Gorodishs loft, Diva Jules loft, Diva

Yet, he is also the stable element in the lm, bringing order to a chaotic web of activities and characters through his own improvised methods. When Gorodish acts, justice and stability come from within the unconscious city instead of the ofcial city, which turns out to be corrupted in the end, ironically blurring the distinctions between structure and disorder that it sought to impose in the rst place. The loft spaces are also elements of stability. They are the places that Jules runs to in order to evade his predators. In their permanence, and the evidence of previous histories, they seem familiar and personal: places of belonging and sanctuary in the rapid city. Beineix manipulates the image so that the glow of light and shadow, specicity of colours, positioning of objects, reectivity of surfaces, give the lofts an illusory and uncanny quality. He reappropriates the spaces through the imaginations of Jules and the other characters; with the spirit of bricolage, he constructs these spaces in the same way that he uses the familiar iconography of mass culture to piece together his vision of the city. The characters reinhabit spaces with the same freedom; often, their present function has no relationship with their history. The lofts contrast with Cynthia Hawkins hotel room, in which everything is consciously arranged, and bears the same meaning for every guest that occupies it. The Diva is essentially a character of the ofcial city: a public persona. In the lm, the spaces associated with her are the stage or the ve-star hotel, performing in front of an audience or for a crowd of journalists at a press conference. Her opinions are published as public property. Her friend is her manager, who tries to convince her to conform to the needs of a consumerist society seeking to rob her of the only element of intimacy and truth in her performance: the immediacy of music that connects her to her audience. Jules connection
Jules loft, Diva

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with her seems fantastic because it traverses the conventional boundaries set up as an agreement between the persona and the public body.

sauve qui pleurent : the inseparability of the unconscious

The place where Cynthia Hawkins becomes a real person is in the unconscious city. In the bar where Jules meets her friend NDoula, the boundaries that separate the Diva from other people seem to disintegrate. When, during their walk through the city, Jules holds his umbrella high above her, it is a restrained gesture of respect: its signicance is quiet and personal, contrasting with her connection to her audience as she stands isolated on stage. This audience owns her public persona: to them, her voice recording is not a violation, but a commodity that rightfully belongs to them. In the scene, the spaces of the city become almost nurturing in their organic formlessness: it is here that the Divas loneliness and vulnerability can emerge from behind her condent and stubborn public persona. The strange relationship that arises between her and Jules speculates the issue of the stranger: it raises the possibility that the endless differences amongst strangers could perhaps be negotiated and overcome by the mutuality of the feelings of loneliness and alienation between them13. In Alphaville, Godard exposes the same emotions, through the transformation of the character Natascha. The tears that she cries when Lemmy Caution is beaten, reminiscent of the condemned man who cried at his wifes death, reveal the existence of irrational emotions that have been repressed
Diva Diva

12

under the citys mandate: Silence-Logic-Safety-Prudence14. Unlike Cynthia Hawkins in Diva, Nataschas emotions are unable to place themselves anywhere in the hard denition of the citys architecture, and her only choice in the end is to ee. Alphaville is a city that makes poetry and love impossible, because it has rid itself of this intermediary zone of instability that is rampant in Beineixs version of Paris: the cost has been the humanity of its people. This city that Godard presents is also pieced together from existing places in Paris, but the nal image here is one that dees the richness of bricolage and its possibility of discovery. Whereas Beineixs fragmentation gives the city a quality of uidity by suggesting the possibility imminent in the shadows of the unknown, Godards fragmented imagery is expressive of a dictatorial urge to control the viewer, through their precision. His camera shots are like the hard lighting and contrast that allow nothing to hide: the light of Alphaville is one that leaves no room for questions. There is one scene in which Godard uses a different light: when Lemmy confronts the poet Henri Dickson in the stairwell, the physicality of the naked bulb hanging between them contrasts the pervasive uorescent lights throughout the rest of the city. The scene occurs in the one place in Alphaville that could compare to Beineixs underworld of criminality: the condemned sector to which Dickson has been exiled, along with other poets and mists of society. This site emphasizes the complete separation between the conscious and the unconscious in the city, and the suffering of each as a result. Although the light is interrogative, it is not blinding like the light of Alpha 60. In this realm of instinct and emotion, it illumiates the truth: the vulnerability of a man who refuses to suppress his belief in love. Lemmys face is bathed in the same light: The
Alphaville

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Henri Dickson and Lemmy Caution, Alphaville

scene movingly epitomizes a mood basic to the whole lm: the sense of Lemmy and Dickson representing a last, and perhaps inadequate and crumbling survival of humanity in a civilization becoming increasingly dehumanized15. Although Lemmys expression hardly registers any outward sympathy during the interrogation, he has already revealed himself to be a man who acts on instinct and is moved by poetry. In his rst interrogation with the machine Alpha 60, Lemmy says that his religion is the immediate promptings of my conscience. He is an agent of the unconscious, invading the rational realm. He then speaks of his journey through the galaxy, to Alphaville: The silence of innite space appalled me16. Lemmy is describing the silence of a people who have ceased to express themselves and to question the meaning of their lives. This silence saturates the images of the city: its spaces are devoid of activity and the only interaction between people occurs through their pre-programmed roles and a limited script of questions and answers. Even sex has become a rationalized encounter between two numbered people, who are assigned to
at the hotel, Alphaville

Alphaville

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eachother during a specic shift of the day; it has nothing to do with love or emotions. To save Natascha, Lemmy lls this silence of the space between them with Surrealist poetry. Godards use of poetry can be compared to Beineixs use of music in Diva. When Jules recounts the yearnings of Cynthia Hawkins character in La Wally to Alba, he is translating the existing script, but the words, as he speaks them, are highly personal. The character wants to go far away, to escape her life: the lyrics now reect Jules desire to transcend the cruelty of reality through music and through the fantasy of space, in a search for beauty. In Alphaville, Lemmy Caution tries to break through the dehumanization of Nataschas soul with the poetry of Paul Eluard: And because I love you everything moves / One need only advance to live, to go / Straight forward towards all that you love / I was going towards you / I was moving perpetually into the light. In part, he may be expressing his own emotions, but more importantly, he is showing her the light of beauty that exists in the expression of human emotions, by stirring those that he believes her to feel. Alphaville is a lm about the redemption of Nataschas soul through beauty17. Lemmys mission in Alphaville is scrawled in his notebook: Sauve qui pleurent. Nataschas tears are obvious; the suffering of the other characters is more difcult to perceive. As the emotions surface in them, they are repressed just as quickly: there is the third-class seductress who asks the forbidden question Why?, or the police-car driver who reveals his fear of death as Lemmy threatens him18. In Alphaville, this suffering has been extracted from societys consciousness; it persists in a places that they choose not to see. Citizens who exhibit emotion are executed, but this denial of the problem does not eliminate the threat that remains alive within each person.
Nataschas interrogation, Alphaville

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The removal of suffering from the consciousness of the city is an identical condition. Comparing the functioning of the city to the psychology of a person, Andrew Levitt writes: Living in the modern city we ignore those parts of the urban fabric which are dangerous, ugly, toxic, abusive or threatening. Over time, the repression of our suffering is destroying our empathy for the suffering of othersthe denial of the problem leads to a denial of feeling . Choosing not to see the afictions of the city removes its humanity, intensifying conditions of separation: conversely, an architecture of compassion and love is naturally one of beauty and connection. Levitt emphasizes that open communication, involving both dialogue and listening, must exist in order for the healing of the city to begin. This dialogue is the catalyst for the creation of identity. Modern anxiety of the unknown has constructed a city of strict denition through social boundaries that protect people, private homes that shut out the stranger but and human interaction, and a completely public realm from which the act of dwelling has been expelled. Separated through this rigidity and focused on production, we no longer have the time to see people as individuals, and the resulting blindness is terrifying to the urban dweller. Suspicion between people cannot be dispelled until dialogue begins. In Diva, Beineix shows simultaneously the potential in the richness of interaction that connects people beneath the separations of social divisions, and the danger of the unconsciousness when it is forced to remain a segregated entity. Main Streetregisters an optimistic desperation The Greek temple, the unused Opera-House, the courthouse sanctioned by the glamour of Napolean IIIs Parisare the evidence of almost frenzied effortto provide stability in an unstable scene20. Rowe and Koetter make an important
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Diva

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observation: the city is a complex and fragile being. As in humans, the choice to confront emotions creates instability: it is a risk, but it is not as dangerous as the reassuring lie of a city that never changes. The conscious construction of spaces that assume specic relationships functions by denying all other possible relationships; it accommodates specic people, excluding anyone who does not t into its system of categorization. The images of cinema allow society to reect visually on the city it has constructed. Although Alphaville is an imaginary place that is set in the future, its philosophy was pieced together from the reality of Facism and other authoritarian governments; similarly, its physical image was taken from existing urban places21. Its cold and rational structure is something that society has deliberately created, and Godards lm seems less fantastic when we consider that it is simply a concentrated extrapolation of reality. Beineix has constructed his rendering from the same fabric, yet, from his perspective, there is beauty, music, and even tentative personal relationships fostered within the city. These connections are the quiet beginnings of the interaction that induces the exchange of dialogue within the public realm; perhaps its place can be reclaimed by confrontating the mutual feelings of alienation, which transcend the endless and inevitable differences between strangers.
Alphaville Alphaville

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endnotes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. pp 879. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. pp 64. Sola-Morales, Ignasi de. Anyplace. Koetter, Fred and Colin Rowe. Collage City. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. pp 45. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Gargett, Adrian. www.talkingpix.co.uk/Article_Beineix.html Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. pp 524. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. pp 38. Simmel, Georg. http://socialpolicy.ucc.ie/the_stranger.htm Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Brooker, Peter. Modernity and Metropolis. pp 125. Benedikt, Michael. http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html Wood, Robin. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard. Wood, Robin. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard. Benedikt, Michael. http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html Benedikt, Michael. http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html Levitt. Andrew. Documentation on City Design and Social Pathology. Koetter, Fred and Colin Rowe. Collage City. Wood, Robin. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard.

lmography
Alphaville: Un Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution. directed by Jean-Luc Goddard. 1965. Diva. directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix. 1980.

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bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Brooker, Peter. Modernity and Metropolis. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House Inc., 1961. Koetter, Fred and Colin Rowe. Collage City. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Sola-Morales, Ignasi de. Terrain Vague. Anyplace. Ed. Cynthia C. Davidson. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. Levitt, Andrew. The City Who is Whole. Documentation on City Design and Social Pathology. Carmel: IMCL Council, 1990. Vidler, Anthony. The architectural uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992. Wood, Robin. Alphaville. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard. Ed. Ian Cameron. London: Studio Vista Limited, 1967.

websites: Jean-Jacques Beineix: Hyper-style. Article by Adrian Gargett www.talkingpix.co.uk/Article_Beineix.html Jean-Jacques Beineix: An interview. by Paula Neechak www.nitrateonline.com/2001/fbeineix.html Architecture against Architecture. ed. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker www.ctheory.net/text_le.asp?pick=94 Alphaville & its Subtext in the Poetry of Paul Eluard. Article by Michael Benedikt http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html The Stranger. excerpt from The Sociology of Gerog Simmel. by Georg Simmel http://socialpolicy.ucc.ie/the_stranger.htm

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