6533b852fe1ef96bd12aa8a8

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Cities of dreams

subject

description

The cinema is fantastical and irresponsible. Its buildings are designed as whims, without even having to submit to the test of equilibrium or consistency or to the most elementary laws of physics. The screen can happily give itself up to the imagination, for nobody will ever call it to account. This condition, which makes it so elusive, also brings it closer to our dreams and longings. The more inconsistent it is, the stronger it becomes as an undying document of all that was produced by the ingenuity of the twentieth century. As a result, examples of fanciful architecture have found their way into films on many occasions, serving to delight architects without subjecting them to the slightest risk, stylising volumes to the point of inhabitability, acting as demiurges of film sets whose days were numbered. Yet those fantasies made it possible to lay foundations in a fertile area of our culture, in the imagination. In these pages I would like to prowl around some of those scenes of urban fantasy, coupling - as in a montage of attractions - various films that belong to the jubilant dawn of the avant-garde with their admittedly subjective reflections in films of recent decades, where they are echoed or which quote from them or recreate their settings. Despite its fragmentary nature, this circular process helps us to glimpse the weary or exultant awareness that many decadent, crepuscular, mannerist or desolate films of the present age possess of having worked their way through the whole of history in just a hundred year