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

1

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 one’s home, once inclusive

of the collectivity of urban spaces that remained undefi ned

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 defi ned 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 fi ner grain of streets and spaces

that struggles to exist: these territories have managed to evade

the control of the public realm. They are diffi cult to defi ne:

formed unintentionally and existing without a specifi c purpose,

they are the interstitial spaces, or voids, that arise between the

cracks of the city’s programmed structure. As the antithesis to Street scene, Diva

2

the offi cial 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-intensifi cation; in the

deepest part of night, when each sound, smell, fl 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 unfulfi lled 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 city’s unoffi cial 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 that…experiences, understands, and invents as

much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four

walls. For this collective…walls with their ‘Post No Bills’ are

its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its

bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace

is the balcony from which it looks down on its household…the

street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar

interior of the masses1.” Benjamin wrote this at a time when

Diva

Diva

3

Haussmann’s 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

Goddard’s vision of a future Paris in his fi 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 city’s history. This erasure of collective memory is linked

to the destruction of personal identity, just as the government’s

outlawing of specifi c 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 specifi c

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 refl ection of the

city that modernism has envisioned and built. Modernism’s

invention of a functional machine-architecture was a reaction

against the presence of tradition and history which, at the

Street scene, Alphaville

4

time, seemed to pull architecture back from the progress that

other industrial fi 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 mind’s unconsciousness, this construction

sprang from the urge to give defi nition 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,

fi 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, fi nding safety in a realm where

everything is obviously visible and comprehensible through its

façade 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 city’s 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 affl icted 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 fi 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 Solà-Morales writes:

“Architecture’s destiny has always been colonization, the

5

imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into

strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it

recognizable…transforming the uncivilized into the cultivated,

the fallow into the productive, the void into the built3.” This

imposition is a refl ection 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 confi ned to specifi c 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 fi nd himself apart from the public body,

amongst people who have become individuals to him.

the notion of bricolage in fi lm

This idea of the fl 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 fi 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

signifi cance of history in everyday objects and spaces, like

the Surrealist objet trouvé. This history is not one of abstract

ideals, but one that conveys the dynamics of inhabitation.

architecture of Alphaville

6

Bricolage is a continuous process that alters the fi 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 specifi c images its creators choose to

superimpose. Like the inevitable evolution of a city, fi lm changes

the context of fi xed ideas or images: this process allows for a re-

evaluation of the image. If Godard has constructed the image

of a city that resists the history of inhabitation in Alphaville,

Jean-Jacques Beineix’s fi lm Diva portrays an opposing vision in

its exploitation of the unconscious identity of Paris. Both fi lms,

though not explicitly set in Paris, have been constructed out of

the city’s existing fabric, and deliberately counter the traditional

rendering of its cinematic image: a romantic city whose history

is explicit in its monuments5. Beineix’s Paris is instead a dark

and fragmented city in which the higher society of music and

art collide with one of criminality, whose unoffi cial history is

written by piecing together the images of Paris’ forgotten and

mundane spaces. Against architecture’s urge to make sense of

the modern metropolis through limits and boundaries, Beineix

fi nds Paris to be a city in which space and interaction between

people are fl 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

warehouse, Diva

Diva

7

defi nition of light, the refl ection 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 fi 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 Situationist’s dérive,

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 fi 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

8

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 undefi ned 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.

Beineix’s Paris is that of Walter Benjamin’s fl âneur, who also

fi nds a dreamscape lying within the objective and functional city;

by reading the city as an experience, it becomes personalized.

The Paris of the fl âneur is not Haussmann’s triumphant order

of boulevards, but “a dark, miry, malodorous city, confi ned

within its narrow lanes…swarming with blind alleys, culs-de-

sac, and mysterious passages, with labyrinths that lead you to

the devil8.” Once these passages are illegitimized, they become

affl icted 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 Benjamin’s 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 traffi ckers who are pushed

into this terrain vague but simultaneously fi nd shelter in its

shadows; the police, authority of the offi cial city who descends

to this criminal realm to become its chief; and the higher

‘classes’ of society that are represented in the fi lm through opera

and music. Jules’ involvement in the police offi cer Sapporta’s

prostitution ring, and the unfolding of its consequences, happen

Jules and Cynthia Hawkins, Diva

9

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 offi cial structure of the

city. He characterizes Georg Simmel’s 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 fi nished,

that of the modern city fi 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 fl ight from Sapporta’s

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 defi nitions of home

as a permanent location. He lives in an abandoned garage:

Nadia at subway, Diva

Nadia at subway, Diva

10

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 fl oating objects within the space.

Gorodish exemplifi es the nomad even more than Jules. His loft

is made up mainly of empty space, darkness pierced through

with precise and artifi cial 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 fi nancial gain it brings him, he is ready to move on

at any minute: when Jules calls him for help after he is shot,

Gorodish’s 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

undefi ned peripheral ruins of an industrial wasteland.

Jules’ loft, Diva

Jules’ loft, Diva

Gorodish’s loft, Diva

11

Yet, he is also the stable element in the fi 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 offi cial 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 fi 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, specifi city of colours, positioning of

objects, refl ectivity 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 offi cial city:

a public persona. In the fi lm, the spaces associated with her

are the stage or the fi 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

12

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 N’Doula, 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 signifi cance 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

Diva’s loneliness and vulnerability can emerge from behind

her confi dent 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 wife’s death, reveal

the existence of irrational emotions that have been repressed

Diva

Diva

13

under the city’s mandate: “Silence-Logic-Safety-Prudence14.”

Unlike Cynthia Hawkins in Diva, Natascha’s emotions are

unable to place themselves anywhere in the hard defi nition

of the city’s architecture, and her only choice in the end is to

fl 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 Beineix’s 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 fi nal image here is one that

defi es the richness of bricolage and its possibility of discovery.

Whereas Beineix’s fragmentation gives the city a quality of

fl uidity by suggesting the possibility imminent in the shadows

of the unknown, Godard’s 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 fl uorescent lights throughout the

rest of the city. The scene occurs in the one place in Alphaville

that could compare to Beineix’s underworld of criminality: the

“condemned sector” to which Dickson has been exiled, along

with other poets and misfi ts 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. Lemmy’s face is bathed in the same light: “The

Alphaville

14

scene movingly epitomizes a mood basic to the whole fi 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 Lemmy’s

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 fi 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 infi nite 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

Henri Dickson and Lemmy Caution, Alphaville

Alphaville

at the hotel, Alphaville

15

eachother during a specifi c shift of the day; it has nothing to

do with love or emotions. To save Natascha, Lemmy fi lls this

silence of the space between them with Surrealist poetry.

Godard’s use of poetry can be compared to Beineix’s 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 refl ect 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 Natascha’s 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 fi lm

about the redemption of Natascha’s soul through beauty17.

Lemmy’s mission in Alphaville is scrawled in his

notebook: “Sauve qui pleurent.” Natascha’s tears are obvious;

the suffering of the other characters is more diffi cult 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 society’s 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.

Natascha’s interrogation, Alphaville

16

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 others…the denial of the problem

leads to a denial of feeling19.” Choosing not to see the affl ictions

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

defi nition 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 Street…registers an optimistic desperation…

The Greek temple, the unused Opera-House, the courthouse

sanctioned by the glamour of Napolean III’s Paris…are the

evidence of almost frenzied effort…to provide stability in

an unstable scene20.” Rowe and Koetter make an important

Diva

17

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 specifi c relationships functions by denying

all other possible relationships; it accommodates specifi c

people, excluding anyone who does not fi t into its system of

categorization.

The images of cinema allow society to refl ect 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 Godard’s fi 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

18

endnotes

1. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. pp 879. 2. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. pp 64. 3. Sola-Morales, Ignasi de. Anyplace. 4. Koetter, Fred and Colin Rowe. Collage City. 5. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. pp 45. 6. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. 7. Gargett, Adrian. www.talkingpix.co.uk/Article_Beineix.html 8. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. pp 524. 9. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix. pp 38.10. Simmel, Georg. http://socialpolicy.ucc.ie/the_stranger.htm11. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. 12. Powrie, Phil. Jean-Jacques Beineix.13. Brooker, Peter. Modernity and Metropolis. pp 125.14. Benedikt, Michael. http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html15. Wood, Robin. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard.16. Wood, Robin. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard.17. Benedikt, Michael. http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html18. Benedikt, Michael. http://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html19. Levitt. Andrew. Documentation on City Design and Social Pathology. 20. Koetter, Fred and Colin Rowe. Collage City.21. Wood, Robin. The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard.

fi lmography

Alphaville: Un Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution. directed by Jean-Luc Goddard. 1965.

Diva. directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix. 1980.

19

bibliography

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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 Gargettwww.talkingpix.co.uk/Article_Beineix.html

Jean-Jacques Beineix: An interview. by Paula Neechakwww.nitrateonline.com/2001/fbeineix.html

Architecture against Architecture. ed. Arthur and Marilouise Krokerwww.ctheory.net/text_fi le.asp?pick=94

Alphaville & its Subtext in the Poetry of Paul Eluard. Article by Michael Benedikthttp://members.aol.com/Clypark/alpha.html

“The Stranger.” excerpt from The Sociology of Gerog Simmel. by Georg Simmelhttp://socialpolicy.ucc.ie/the_stranger.htm