The Tuschinski and Cineac movie theatres in Amsterdam look at each other across the middle of the tiny Regulierbreestraat. Both venues are modern, both are characteristic of their respective eras, and both propose through the metaphor of cinema a radical and committed vision of what the modern world should be. Individually, they express respectively the rapture and vision of imagination and the cold calculation of the machine era. Together, as they can be seen from the street, they manage to figure an oxymoron which itself is a paradigmatic representation of Modernity. This paper examines the language, context and configuration of both buildings and explores the consequences of their programmatic opposition for the tenets of architectural historiography.