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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
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