James Joyce – Mark Bould

Reading The Great Writers, part two

A shorter middle bit
Of the 54 titles in The Great Writers series, I had, it turned out, already read 15.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
One advantage of aspirational Protestant parents convinced of the value of reading is that abridged and unabridged Pilgrim’s Progresses are put in front of you before you are ten years old.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
In the first year of junior school, our teacher (Mrs Eaton) would end every day by reading a few pages of Alice in Wonderland to us (I remember someone spotting the caterpillar in the famous illustration was, it transpires famously, the wrong colour). But that was way too slow a pace for impatient little me, so I got a copy of it (and Through the Looking Glass (1871)) out of the village library.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
I got an abridged paperback version in a red leatherette-effect cover from Trago Mills in the mid-70s (also The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)) but have no idea (in either case) when in the intervening years I first read it unabridged. But I do remember already having experienced that feeling of relief when you finally get through the Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan and wash ashore in the Land of the Houyhnhnms (even if I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to pronounce it).

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
Again, I remember an abridged version (and of Dracula (1897) in the same imprint) in the mid- 70s. Sadly, though, I remember nothing about their undoubtedly cheap and nasty bindings – or, in either case, of when in the intervening years I first read the book proper.

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I fell in love with Sherlock Holmes courtesy of Basil Rathbone and, especially, Nigel Bruce, whose mere presence in a film still cheers me up. I remember seeing The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and the way too-scary The Scarlet Claw (1944) and being terrified by the Creeper in The Pearl of Death (1944), presumably all part of a late-70s early evening weekday season on BBC2. Somehow there was a copy of Hound in the junior school library, and then around the turn of the decade I got one of those cheap hardback omnibus editions of all the Holmes stories and novels as an Xmas gift, which I devoured.

In fact, I loved Holmes so much back then that one day in 1985 I feigned illness so I could stay home from school to finish reading Cay Van Ash’s Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (1984), which I’d started the night before (it was probably my first brush with Fu Manchu outside of those Christopher Lee films), and the following year I stayed up late watching Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper/Freemasons in Murder By Decree (Clark 1979) rather than revising for the next morning’s Biology O-level exam.

HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
In the first term of my final year at junior school, I read an extract (the protagonist diving underwater to escape the Martian heat rat) for a comprehension exercise – and raced to the school library. But it only had a copy of The Invisible Man (1897); my memory is of a paperback tie-in with the 1975 TV series – just a picture of David McCallum on the cover – but as there was a novelisation of the pilot episode by Michael Jahn I now wonder if I read both and have jumbled them up.

The village library didn’t have a copy of War of the Worlds, either, but Xmas was not far off. Nor was my Jeff Wayne album tie-in copy (which finally fell apart about a decade ago.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)
I seem to have gone through a nautical phase in the late 70s. Possibly because of Gulliver’s Travels, the Frankenstein frame story, Ursula K Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea (which I did not like and tbh still don’t) or Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1875) – both of which I’d read in bowdlerised abridged versions – or RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), the first chapter of which I doggedly read half a dozen times as a child, without ever getting any further. But it was more likely because of Willard Price’s Southsea Adventure (1952), Underwater Adventure (1954), Whale Adventure (1960) and Diving Adventure (1969), from a series which briefly, but only temporarily, took that special place in my heart reserved for The Three Investigators (1964–87) series, which had already dislodged Enid Blyton’s Famous Five (1942–63) and Adventure (1944–55) series (I never could stand The Secret Seven (1949–63)).

But, my god, the black spot! That really put the willies up me.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, and Other Stories (1830s–1840s)
I asked for a big paperback omnibus of Poe for my fourteenth birthday (it contained everything except Eureka), and then worked through it a story, poem or chapter of Pym per day (for years, the only bit of Pym I could actually remember was the great big disappearing dog). But it is only since I had a panic attack during an MRI scan in 2020 that I have developed claustrophobia. And although I have never had a nightmare about being buried alive, I did later that year wake up screaming from a dream in which I was trapped in a small space below deck, in full costume, with Ridley Scott filming me as the lead in his grittily realistic live-action Captain Pugwash reboot. I wish I was making this up, but I am also pretty impressed at myself that I don’t have to.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
We’d read an abridged version of A Christmas Carol in at secondary school, and I was so offended at being deemed incapable of reading the full text that I got it out of the school library. I think it must have been in the second year, because I had a very combative relationship with our English teacher that year. We got off to a bad start when she selected John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony (1933) for us to read as a class. Everyone hated it (which in retrospect I realise was probably just me and a couple of other little gobshites who joined in). We protested so much, she dropped it and picked something else for us to read. I forget what, but we were heady with victory and could smell blood.

Sometime around then I got into a stupid row with her, which she ended (or so she thought) by saying ‘If you’re so smart, why don’t you read Ulysses?’.

So I got a copy out of the Central Library and did just that. One chapter per day for two-and-a-half weeks, understanding almost none of it. Once I was done, I took it into class, dropped it casually on my desk and asked if she had any other recommendations.

I was fourteen. Forty years later, I am still appalled at what an awful little shit I was.

It is also very difficult to reconcile these memories with the crippling shyness from which I suffered, the frequent terror of speaking, the incomprehension of other people, who were all so fucking weird – either terrifyingly random or so predictable they were even scarier. But I was also a cheeky little bugger, with a tendency to brinksmanship and a self-destructive edge.

The former would probably now be considered social anxiety and fortunately have some apparatus of understanding and support. But alongside the latter, I am more inclined to think of it as class anxiety. The terror of social mobility, of transclass social non-reproduction. Plus puberty.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
I know I had already read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1945) because my brother, a couple of years older than me, was doing his CSEs in 1983 and he bribed and/or bullied me into writing his English Literature coursework essays for him. I remember him being annoyed at having to copy them out long-hand so no one could prove he had cheated. But later he was so delighted to have outwitted his Secondary Modern, which had been so quick to (mis)judge his abilities. Not that this triumph necessarily proved them wrong.

Somewhere in that confluence of events, I read Huxley – probably just to make a smart aside in one of those essays, a foible I still have.

Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) and Island (1962) would have followed in pretty short order, and I remember the this-is-not-a-sequel disappointment of Brave New World Revisited (1958). Thanks to an Orwell essay, I’d have read Zamyatin’s We (1924) around the same time, which quickly led me to his The Dragon and Other Stories (coll.1966) and Islanders and The Fisher of Men (coll.1984), which in turn got me to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1967) not long after.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400)
My posh mate Rob was reading one of the Tales, I forget which, for his A-level English, so I picked up a cheap complete Tales and slowly worked my way through it over a couple of years. This long slow read led to a classic autodidact’s lack-of-cultural-capital moment when I was interviewed at Oxford University (the first and possibly still the only pupil from my Comprehensive ever to even apply to Oxford or Cambridge). Asked what I was reading that was not on my A-level syllabus, I mentioned I had recently completed the Tales. Surprised, the interviewer asked whether I was reading it in translation or in ‘Middle English’. I had never even heard of ‘Middle English’ and had no idea how to reply, so he filled the awkward silence by lecturing me, a state school upstart, on how I could not claim to have read Chaucer if I was only reading a translation. His disdain was palpable; I withered beneath it. The interview ground to a halt. I was not offered a place at that College.

However, I had read Chaucer in Middle English! And Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And Pearl. And Sir Orfeo.

I’m pretty sure this is a case of biting off my own nose to spite my face when I’d rather be punching his, but because of that wanker’s class contempt, I have never voluntarily read any other Middle English, not even Piers Plowman (just a couple of shorter poems I was obliged to read in our first-year survey course at university).

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
This is one of those books I saw in Penguin but picked up in a cheaper US paperback (with yellow edges) at my local independent bookstore, In Other Words, on Mutley Plain in Plymouth. Which was also where I bought Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, The Essential James Joyce (containing Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (19116) and excerpts from Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)) and the three omnibus editions of Chandler novels I still have. It was also where I bought my girlfriend Jane a copy of Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology (1984), the sequel to Sisterhood is Powerful (1970). I have always been given to big romantic gestures.

I spent a lot of time in that shop. It was a haven during some confusing times. They were always welcoming and kind. And once they noticed how careful I was with books, and how unable to afford them, they were fine with me popping in on my way home from school and reading books in half-hour chunks without buying them. At Xmas, they would give me mulled wine, even though I was clearly underage. It was also one of the places where I started to piece together a political education by reading – The Communist Manifesto, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Mutual Aid, Bakunin on Anarchism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, A Room of One’s Own, The Dialectic of Sex, The Female Eunuch, Intercourse, The Wretched of the Earth, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, goodness knows what else – but also just as much by enjoying their generosity, conviviality, community.

Mind you, all I can really remember of Far From the Madding Crowd is finding Bathsheba Everdene really irritating – oh, and the bit about punching holes in sheep to let out trapped wind.

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Wuthering Heights was one of our lower-Sixth A-level texts, and I remember being really angry at the implausibility of Nelly being able to witness certain events. I was so furious – don’t ask me to explain the logic, presumably something to do with narrative perspective – that I was driven by rage to read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and then (obvs) John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy (1930–6). I was clearly broken in some way, and not merely in terms of the unthinking misogyny clearly underpinning such a response.

I’d been reading and protesting my way into socialism and anti-racism, and had been hanging out with a bunch of self-proclaimed anarchists from Plymouth Polytechnic. They knew a student I knew from my parent’s church, and had seen me in her company somewhere, so assumed I was way older than actually I was. (Reader, I did not disabuse them.) But any feminist education would still have been a year or so in the future, courtesy of Jane.

I broke with those anarchists over their refusal to do anything in support of the great miners’ strike. There were really just middle-class wankers who liked to sound radical while smoking dope. Jane was a much better influence.

Oh, and I long since changed my mind about Wuthering Heights (it is probably now my favourite Bronte novel, so much more bonkers than anything her sisters ever ventured) and am less convinced of Brunner’s genius (though I still read him, most recently The Great Steamboat Race (1983)), but remain steadfast, forty years later, in my opinion that The 42^nd Parallel is the best volume of Dos Passos’s trilogy (it provided, along with a quote from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks and another from Billy Zane, an epigraph to my The Cinema of John Sayles: A Lone Star (2009)).

William Shakespeare, Comedies and Tragedies (1590s–1610s)
I have no idea which plays were in these volumes. But in 1986, The Oxford Shakespeare was published and I got a hardback copy as some kind of come-on from a postal book club (I think – I can’t imagine being able to afford it otherwise). But like Ulysses and The Canterbury Tales, I worked through it steadily, a play a week, then some poems until I was done.

In 1991, I took that volume into my finals exam on Shakespeare; it was an open-book exam, and we were supposed to leave our copies of individual plays behind to be checked for notes, but the invigilator took one look at this immense pristine tome I’d lugged up to campus and said not to bother as no one in their right mind deface it by writing notes in it.

But what, you are undoubtedly thinking, of the other 39 titles?

Reading The Great Writers, part three

The City in Fiction and Film, week 8

week 7

This week we watched Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda France/Italy 1962) as a way to begin thinking about human movement in, across and around the city. The plan was to consider the ideas of the flâneur/flâneuse and flânerie, the dérive (with a hint of le Parkour and le traceur) – but some ad hoc essay-writing support took up part of the class, which meant more detailed work on Guy Debord and the dérive had to be bumped to next week’s class.

Our starting point was the opening of Michel de Certeau’s essay ‘Walking in the City’, which begins with an elaborated contrast of viewing New York from the top of the World Trade Center and living at street level. He describes the city, seen from on high, as ‘a texturology in which extremes collide’ – a visual field made up of, on the one hand, the new structures that constantly irrupt into the scene, reeking of ambition, blocking out the rest of the city and challenging the future, and on the other hand, ‘yesterday’s buildings’, degraded, turned into trashcans, their accomplishments discarded. One intriguing phrase – ‘brutal oppositions of races and styles’ – fuses the architectural diversity of the city (buildings so different from each other that they might belong not just to different styles but to different races) with the racial segregation of the city created by generations of concentrated white wealth and privilege even when de jure segregation is illegal.

To bring this all a little closer to home, we looked at some recent photographs of London’s skyline – the new buildings that tower over St Paul’s cathedral (the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, the Lingam, the Carbuncle Award-winning Walkie Talkie), and in the distance Canary Wharf, and over the Thames the Shard. Precisely the kind of urban perspective that reveals ‘a city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs’.

de Certeau makes his first move from thinking of the city as a texturology to thinking of it as a text when he describes New York’s monumental buildings as ‘the tallest letters in the world compos[ing] a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production’.

Rising to the top of the WTC is ‘to be lifted out of the city’s grasp’, to be liberated from the encounters with others, with difference, with the peril and stress of the streets. It is to be separated out from the masses, the supposedly threatening mob. It is to become Icarus, soaring above the labyrinths constructed by Daedalus. (Given Icarus’s fate, this seems at first like a rather odd allusion, and one that is oddly proleptic – like Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (US 1983) – of the fate of the WTC. Maybe I should have rewatched Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (Wenders West Germany/France 1987) in preparation – or at least subjected the class to some Nicolas Cage from City of Angels (Silberling Germany/US 1998)).

The height of the building distances the viewer from the city and other people, and in a vaguely messianic mode transfigures him into a god-like being, liberated from the ‘bewitching world’ and all its fleshy entanglements. From the perspective of such a deity the city is now merely a text to be read. This consummation represents ‘the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive’ to see and to know. Attaining such perfect knowledge (or, rather, the ‘fiction of [such] knowledge’) is the consequence of a ‘lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more’. Here, lust is a wonderfully embodied term with which to describe the drive for a disembodied seeing and knowing – it reveals the contradiction underpinning it all: the material can never become immaterial, reason can never exist outside of the flesh that reasons.

(This prompted a further digression into our unexpected parallel module on the history of art, describing the development of perspectival art, with the aid of Tintoretto – not Dom from the F&F movies – and Cannaleto; and some gesturing towards the notion of Cartesian space.)

King Kong – especially the poster for the 1976 version, in which he bestrides the WTC with Manhattan spread out behind him as in some of the photos we looked at – brought us back to de Certeau, who asks ‘‘Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth…?’ In brief, yes. It is why the tallest building always gets the giant ape, why the presence of this simian embodiment of white supremacist fears/stereotypes of black masculinity (clutching a white girl snatched from her bed) – and, some argue, though less persuasively, of bourgeois dread of the impoverished mob – is such a scandal. There are too many ways in which Kong and all the things he represents just do not belong there (which is also what makes him so cool). If, to achieve his perfect vision/knowledge/power, the ‘voyeur-god … must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them’, then damn right we want the big monkey dragging him back down. Gotta love us some primate insurrection. And ape it.

de Certeau contrasts the voyeur-god (associated with the city planner, and other modes of top-down power that seek to surveil, know and control urban space) with the ‘ordinary practitioners of the city … “down below”’ – that is, those of us do not rise above the streets but walk them. For de Certeau, our perambulations constitute an alternative city, an ‘urban text’ written by walking. And although, lacking a god’s-eye perspective, we cannot read this text, our paths make up ‘intertwining, unrecognized poems’:

The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. … a migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.

Which is all a little abstract, if rather beautiful, so we took a look at the first parkour sequence from Banlieue 13/District 13 (Morel 2004), in which we are introduced to David Belle’s dissident traversals of segregated urban space – a tactics of renegade mobility that counters strategies of urban control and nurtures existence in the the cracks of the world-machine.

Jump back 150 years to the Parisian arcades and to the actual and literary phenomenon of the flâneur (and flâneuse) – the stroller, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. Balzac described flânerie as ‘the gastronomy of the eye’. And Baudelaire, in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, describes the flâneur thus:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world … a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito … the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.

An intriguing figure, the flâneur obviously recalls Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ and Woolf’s narrator in ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (which we studied in week three) but also perhaps Hans Becker, the serial killer in Lang’s M (which we studied in week two). He also combines the two identities that de Certeau separates out – he is in the crowd but not of the crowd, he keeps himself sovereign and separate, an observer more than a participant. Because of this detached attitude, he is never overwhelmed by the urban spectacle he observes, and he is able to invest imaginative power in the most banal of sights. And his very existence is threatened by the speed of urban circulation, the exhausting intellectual activity it requires to defeat the boredom of the city, the intoxication of commodities, and the imposition of rationality and order on the city.

Which brought us to Cléo de 5 à 7.

The film famously opens with colour footage of a tarot reading, shot from directly above the table on which the cards are spread out, before cutting to conventional black-and-white close-ups for inserts of Cléo during the reading; the rest of the film, much of which is spent prowling Paris streets, is also in black-and-white. This resonates strongly with de Certeau, especially as the god’s-eye view of the table is of a tarot reading that gives us a broad outline of the film’s story. Authoritative and transcendent – colour! – it knows everything; but is in such broad strokes that we need to get down onto the level of the streets and the people who walk them to know the story. We need to be immersed in the grasp of the city.

Later, this metatextual commentary is developed in the film-within-the film – in which Jean-Luc Godard, playing a Harold Lloyd figure, chooses between black and white versions of his lover. Inevitably he chooses blonde Anna Karina, after the black one has died. (And Cléo will not die of cancer but find love, or at least a lover.) The association of blackness with death has already been established when Cléo, looking out of a cab, twice starts at seeing African masks displayed in shop windows. This obviously problematic connection fits into the broader opposition between circulation and stasis that structures the film, and is also played out in the oppositions between image and reality.

This is a film full of mirrors and reflections (and great technical virtuosity in terms of how infrequently you can glimpse any sign in the reflecting surface of the film crew). A lot of this is organised around Cléo’s vanity or insecurity or sense of mortality, whatever it is that prompts her to look at her own reflection quite so often (as she becomes less self-obsessed and more open to the world around her, so reflections disappear from the film). It is picked up on in the allusions to fairy-tales (Sleeping Beauty, Snow White), the protagonists of which both spend time in a deathlike condition. And it is there when Cléo’s friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blanck), an artist’s model, explains why she has no problem posing nude: the sculptors do not see her, they see an idea. And it is there in the film-in-the-film, when women are explicitly compared to dolls or puppets.

In contrast to this material about image/stasis/death, we have long sequences of Cléo, alone and in company, walking or being driven around Paris – part of the intertwining, unrecognized poem of the city. Does this make her a flâneuse?

In some ways, yes. For most of the film she is in the crowd but not of it, holding herself at a distance – perhaps best captured in the sequence in the second half of the film which intercuts between her point-of-view shots (including memories) and those of the pedestrians walking towards her. She also clearly wants to be noticed, to have her distinctiveness acknowledged by others, as in the café sequence when she puts one of her own records on the jukebox and wanders around, hoping that someone will at least recognise her.

But in some ways no. Perhaps most especially in the delirious hat shop sequence, in which she utterly succumbs to the commodity spectacle (and demonstrates her amazing superpower – to make any hat, no matter how ridiculous it looks when on display, appear fabulous the moment she puts it on.)

week 9

Recommended critical reading
AlSayyas, Nezar. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. London: Routledge, 2006. See chapter 1 “Industrial Modernity: the Flaneur and the Tramp in the Early Twentieth Century City.”
Mazlish, Bruce. “The Flâneur: From Spectator to Representation.” The Flâneur. Ed. in Keith Tester. London: Routledge, 1994. 43–60.
Mennel, Barbara. Cities and Cinema. London: Routledge, 2008. See chapter 3, “The City of Love: Paris.”
Pratt, Geraldine and Rose Marie San Juan. Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2104. On Cléo, see 77–89.
Scalway, Helen. “The Contemporary Flâneuse.” The Invisible Flâneuse: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Ed. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. 164–71.
Weihsmann, Helmut. “Ciné-City Strolls: Imagery, Form, Language and Meaning of the City Film.” Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban Phenomena Through the Moving Image. Ed. François Penz and Andong Lu. Bristol: Intellect, 2011. 23–41.
Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Invisible Flâneur.” New Left Review 191 (1992): 90–110.
Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. 34–50.
–. “Gender and the Haunting of Cities (or, the retirement of the flâneurThe Invisible Flâneuse: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Ed. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. 18–31.

Recommended reading
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) are the great modernist novels of walking in the city. Other poetry. fiction and non-fiction about flânerie and about traversing the city by tactical means include Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen (1869), Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926), Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930–43), Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959), Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro (1959), Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997), Edmund White’s The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2001) and Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2014).

Recommended viewing
Films about wandering around the city or traversing the city by tactical means include Zazie dans le metro (Malle 1960), Tokyo Drifter (Suzuki 1966), After Hours (Scorsese 1985), London (Keiller 1994), District 13 (Morel 2004), Adrift in Tokyo (Miki 2007), Enter the Void (Noé 2009) and Holy Motors (Carax 2012).