Alice in the Cities: The Uses of Disorientation Brenda Austin-Smith This child is getting scared! The camera slowly tracks back The leaves tremble, the street is wet. -Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures The enduring value of the scene, quite apart from its pedagogical value as a teachable segment or a thematic miniature, is its power to enchant, to inspire the kind of movie love that we call cinephilia. It is the scene that draws many of us back to film, "to the unique moment and to that special place-in short, to the quest for plenitude, envelopment, and enclosure [...] the enactment of a search for lost time" (Elsaesser 39). Whether re-attached to the larger work by scholarly interest or carefully preserved as a reservoir of intense experience, the scene is a privileged fragment, as likely to be fondly mis-remembered from the one-time screening, as it is to be stored and posted on a personal website for sharing, or for repeated and loving perusal. The scene I want to describe here is from the road film Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974). The scene does not do much straightforward narrative work in this languid film, but provides an example of what I can only call 'vertiginous cinema', film that dislocates us both emotionally and physically by representing experience in a way we can't fully explain, but are completely held in thrall by. This is not simply the dizziness we might feel watching a shot taken from inside a roller coaster, but