Universality as a Radical Form

This chapter demonstrates the immanent frictions within the model of French universalism in the “postwar” years and suggests that historiography based on a sole appurtenance to a nation-state was already internally vexed. It provides these frictions to the fore in the following ways: First, by considering the film in its affinity with the medium of photography and the contemporaneous transatlantic interest in constituting universal photographic archives of art, society, and culture through inventive display and exhibition formats and relational media environments. Second, by examining each protagonist's singular methods for harnessing the state-of-the-art media at their disposal to create spatial and sonic experiences of absorption, immersion, and “interiority” within the Pavilion. The chapter argues that Le Corbusier, Xenakis, and Varèse generated sonic, aural, and spatial intersections that articulated the discourse of humanism central to Expo 58 while simultaneously negotiating paradoxes embedded in the universal image of the “people” of “Europe”.