In the White City will, among other things, make you long for Lisbon, despite its being captured as a no-man's-land, adrift somewhere between space and time. Alain Tanner's complete command of his experimental art is nowhere more in evidence than in this film about a man who turns his whole life into an experiment, then grasps for control, super-8 camera in hand. Bruno Ganz is marvelous as the disaffected sailor who jumps ship in Lisbon and drifts through that city's steep streets and ghostly alleyways, going in and out of the ecstasy that comes with being on the edge. Amid the sailors' bars and sleepless nights, and the sleep-filled days in which time stops, he falls in love with a barmaid (played by an exuberant Portuguese actress, Teresa Madruga). All the while he sends cryptic super-8 film messages home to his wife-impersonal records of streets, building facades and unknown people who somehow must stand in for his experience. In the White City, in its sailor's hypnotic wanderings through buildings and color, links Tanner both with Ruiz and Antonioni; along with his own Messidor, it is another in this director's explorations of the soul when it is knocked off its cultural axis.