Born in the heart of the modern city, cinema has blossomed within a special relationship with urban space, both geographically and aesthetically. For avantgarde filmmakers of the (1920-1930s), the city was thought to be a suitable environment for the search of an autonomous cinematic language, breaking with the dominant entertainment production by taking advantage of a unique and varied sensory range. In this paper, the author precisely questions the link between urban space and the filmic medium in the historical moment of cultural modernity, by focusing on the city symphony genre. Against the common idea of a natural encounter of cinema with the city, the paper shows how the city portraits of 1920-1930 recreate the sensory experience of the city by working actively on the possibilities of the filmic medium. It analyzes how the avant-garde mise-en-scène of city space not only reflects urban modernity but takes part in its invention. Cinema creates and promotes the specific scopic regime of modernity : an omniscient look, freed from the bodily constraints of the ordinary city dweller. However, the author shows how this dominant regime is troubled by an alternative representation where inhabitants take an active part in the city : throughout the film this tension both documents and performs the complexity of the dynamics that make the city.