brutality as nervous aggression, an exaggerated violence that can always be extracted from the sensory-motor relations in the action-image. […] It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities […] It can be a limit-situation, […] but also the most banal, a plain factory, or a wasteland.«7 One might say that Graham’s «Cinema» deals with both at the same time.

In «Lectures,» Graham pointed out that, in his architecture designs, he does what he did in «Time Delay Room» (1974–1976) with the media of mirrors and glass. In both cases, a consciousness of the now is produced in which incommensurable peaks of the present are linked, so that a psychological effect of depth is evoked in which, unexpectedly, the past is reactivated. This effect cannot be understood only by studying the genesis and typology of the forms of construction to which Graham refers: instead, this «external history» in the created situation is placed back in an «inner history,» where it is analyzed as a kind of sublimity. The structures of modern cinema, as Deleuze analyzed them, appear in Graham’s «Cinema» in

architectonical form, inseparably linked to concepts from the film theory of metapsychology and ideology critique; both experience a mutual intensification which stands in the service of a historical experience, as Benjamin describes it. In the 1980s, film theory from the 1970s was often confronted with the objection that the «cinema viewing subject» is a mere theoretical fiction: it was argued that what was instead needed is a return of film theory to an empirical basis and to actual spectators. One can only hope that this statement of intent with regards to the empirical is not contained by the insight that Graham's «Cinema» can be built and should be built.