Many spoke of being "invisible" and "the lowest of the low", and of being spoken to rudely.
Most of the city continued to be wooden, low, and of small units.
But the prospect of such encounters must remain low, and, of course, fiction has proved a very poor guide to scientific reality, as the story of the island of Flores has so starkly demonstrated.
The last 30 years in art history are in large part a story of collaborative enterprises, of collapsed boundaries between high art and low, and of the end of divisions between media.
But the U.S. Federal Reserve has been more accepting than the European Central Bank of keeping interest rates low and of pumping extra money into the banking system in a bid to restart the engines of the economy.
As it shifts from one location to the next, "Clouds of Sils Maria" lights from subject to subject, among them female friendships, female rivalries, tabloid notoriety, the loss of privacy in the Internet age, high culture versus low, and, of course, cinema itself.
