One of the fundamental events of modernity was the conquest of the world as picture, a process in which movies were essential. Cinema was the single medium capable of capturing what Alexander Kluge describes as the “the impossible moment”—a moment we couldn’t think of beforehand, and which cannot be repeated later. Thus cinema leads the way to what later becomes reality: to cities, bridges, ideas, gestures, skyscrapers, literature, and art. This anthology, Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Architecture, traces some of the paths of this “becoming.”