Present future(s)
Code 46 (2003), Michael Winterbottom

“The future is already here, it’s simply unevenly distributed” – William Gibson

Code 46 refers to the article forbidding any ‘unlawful’ unselected reproduction between two individuals in director Winterbottoms’s vision of a near future. The film tells the story of an insurance investigator, who travels to Shanghai to trace a smuggler of travel documents, or “papeles”, required to pass from the desert ‘outside’ to the urban ‘inside’ and from one urban ‘inside’ to another. The futuristic world is essentially composed of mega cities and exterior wastelands, riddled with a network of checkpoints and borders limiting people from the ‘outside’ from getting into the cities.

Winterbottom chose a number of locations to shoot the film, weaving them together intelligently to achieve what Mark Tildesley, the film’s set designer, calls a “creative geography”: the urban interior is shot in Pudong, the hypermodern part of Shanghai (built in just over 15 years), and the desert ‘outside’ in Dubai, India and Rajasthan. The different locations were chosen to achieve a maximum contrast in landscape, and yet to trick the minds of the audience into believeing the genuine closeness between locations. Its effect is deeply poetic yet troubling, as Western society’s knowledge of Middle Eastern geography is fragmented.

Winterbottom admits that “A lot of the aspects of the world of the film are amalgams of things that already exist... it wasn’t about creating or inventing anything, it was just, ‘this bit is interesting’, ‘that bit is interesting’ and putting them together. Shanghai is the main city, but we put the desert of Dubai around the outside of Shanghai. You can juxtapose two elements that aren’t together in reality, but you can see those connections in a slightly odd light.”

The film does not simply appear to be a moral judgement of a dystopic world, but more a relfection on the love between two characters within it. One can’t help but to think of the jazzman Herman Hupfeld’s words throughout the story :   “The fundamental things apply, 
As time goes by.” 

the desert "outside"

the urban "inside"

The world of CODE 46 is essentially composed of mega cities and desert outsides.

To borrow a few words from Geoff Manaugh, the film’s credibility derives from a “weaving together of insides and outsides, cores and peripheries”At no time do we perceive a progressive transition between the two. The checkpoints and barriers play the role of entering one space and exiting another. The claustrophobic feel that the film sometimes gives the viewer can interestingly enough be compared to another of Winterbottom’s works : Road to Guantanamo. In this film, Winterbottom recounts the true story of the Tipton Three and their capture by the US army. However, the point of comparison can be created as the three men seem to drift from place to place with virtualy no barriers stopping them.

Code 46 projects the ultimately globalized future, where people speak a mixed language composed mainly of English, but with additions of French, Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Farsi and Mandarin, a futuristic ‘newspeak’ of sorts.

Although changes have crept into human society, such as the legalisation of genetic manipulation concerning ‘wanted births, (closely reminding us of Gattaca) and the government routinely erasing memories for a greater good, very few’science fiction type’ transformations exist. In other words, Code 46 manages to create a future made from a more authentic use of present day objects and locations.

sea front view of Pudong, Shanghai

sea front of Pudong, Shanghai

                      

                       

street view inside Pudong

inside of Lloyds by Richard Rogers

However, a question arises : Can a film like this only exist in a very narrow time-gap in history?

Does our belief in its realism come from the unfamiliarity of the locations used? We have notions of what Shnaghai looks like, but not of what its periphery does. What is it about the actual context of urbnanisation that allows us to see these cities as possible futures? One might recall that Dredd is partly filmed in Johannesburg, Cape Town, for example.

Many sequences blur together landscapes, buildings, and infrastructures from different cities-yet this unfamiliar new place to which we’ve been introduced might very well exist. Novelist William Gibson’s famous line goes, « the future is already here, it’s simply unevenly distributed ». 

This also appears to be true in the context of architectural form and urban landscapes.

At this moment, it would be interesting to bring Kenneth Frampton’s thoery of architecture into the picture. He proposes that « the building invariably comes into existence out of the constantly evolving interplay of three converging vectors : the topos, the typos and the tectonic ». Topos refers to the site, the environment and the context in which a building is constructed. Typos refers to the function or purpose of the space that a building defines. And finally,tectonics refers to the hysical construction of the building, the assembly of its elements. If one were to take topos, or the site, out of the formula, what were to happen ? If we began building city ‘types’ or ‘units’ that could be airlifted into any place in the world, how would the absence of connection based on topological or even historical meaning, affect the attitude of its inhabitants ? Indeed, it appears that Code 46 poses the question of cities bui in places without history and therefore rendering the city itself incomprehensible. If we were to look at the example of Dubai, we see a concentration of architecture without connection to the earth it stands upon. Built in an otherwise inhospitable environment, the city requires desalinisation plants to supply 98,8% of its water. Dubai has become symbolic for its skyscrpers and high rise buildings ,although, originally, the skyscraper was created as a response to stop Chicago’s horizontal sprawling, and seek a vertical densification. The BLDG BLOG phrases a nice description, and one that I’d like to associate with a city like Dubai : “Cities now erupt and linger; they are both too early and far too late. Cities move in, take root and expand, whole neighborhoods throwing themselves together in convulsions of glass and steel.” The image of the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz appears, therefore, not too distant.

Dubai, a scene from Code 46

the Emerald City, the Wizard of Oz

Present Future(s)

Alphaville, a strange adventure of Lemmy Caution, (1965) Godard

Alphaville, shot by Godard and Coultard in 1965 is a blend of dystopian science fiction and film noir, which is highly influenced by German expressionist cinema.

On account of a low budget production, although more importantly, a genuine desire to capture a future that was already coming about, Godard chose Paris by night as his inhumane steel and glass futuristic projection of society.

The film is centered on Lemmy Caution, a stereotypical trench coat/weather beaten investigator, who is sent to Alphaville, located on a distant planet, for a series of missions: to locate a missing agent, and kill the creator of Alphaville, a certain professor Von Braun.

What he finds is a technocratic dictatorship, ruled by an all-seeing/all-hearing computer, Alpha 60, that bears an uncanny resemblance to George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ from 1984 (1949).

The city outlaws free thought, love and emotion. In other words, the sentient Alpha 60 computer tries to reproduce an image of itself in human society, creating mindless drones. Tech-noir elements can be traced throughout the film, notably, the flashing E=mc^2 and E=hv (Planck postulate) equations remind the audience of the logical rules of governance that pervade this futuristic society.

It is interesting to note how the ‘bad cop’ character of Lemmy Caution stands out in this grey surrealist world- Godard originally wanted the title of the film to be Tarzan versus IBM.

As mentioned before, Godard made no use of futuristic sets, but filmed portions of Paris that struck him as architectural nightmares. The definition of science fiction by Robert Heinlein sits nicely in the film: “(a) realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present”. The city appears to be in constant darkness, apart from a few final scenes, and bears a claustrophobic characteristic that may remind us of Paul Citroen’s “Metropolis” photo-collage (1922).

The buildings used in Alphaville are the Electricity Board building (for the Alpha 60 computer center), the Hotel Sofitel Paris le Scribe and the recently finished Maison de la Radio de France (1963), not to mention various infinitely long brightly lit motorways and parking lots.

Electricity Board Building

one of the many corridors in the Hotel Sofitel Paris

Maison de la Radio

a labyrinthe of roads and motorways criss cross Alphaville

Ironically enough, the uncaring transparent future that Godard is criticizing, (and that Walter Benjamin both highly criticized and appreciated) permits him to film otherwise difficult scenes. Indeed, according to Coultard, during the beginning sequence, Lemmy Caution takes an elevator ride up to his room at the Hotel Sofitel. This was achieved due to the hotel having two glass walled elevators. These were synchronized (although after multiple attempts) so as to permit the camera operator in one elevator cabin to film the occupants of the second elevator.

The transparent future also permits Godard and Coultard to film the sometimes-lengthy arrivals and departures of characters into buildings. It can be said that panes upon panes of glass filter our vision. Revolving doors and continuous corridors create a dizzying atmosphere. It is interesting to note that it is essentially spaces of circulation that are filmed. 

Indeed, corridors, parking lots, motorways, and hotels constitute places of constant movement, where no real mark of individuality can be placed. The coldness associated with international style (advanced by Mies Van der Rohe) therefore acts as a perfect match for these places. What Godard is also remarking is the perpetual movement of society in his unsteady society, which can be linked, although more exponentially, to the notion of movement in Metropolis by Fritz Lang.

As Sir Kingsley Amis observed, in his New Maps of Hell: a Survey of Science Fiction (1958), science fiction’s focus was shifting away from the depiction of life on other planets to the otherness of life of Earth. It therefore seemed natural that fears about standardization, consumerism and automation were described.  

Since the production of Alphaville there has been much criticism of its ‘many influences’. Indeed, as stated in the beginning of the article, the resemblance to 1984 is astonishing. The supercomputer Alpha 60 can be easily compared with Big Brother. The characters of Lemmy Caution and the daughter of Von Braun defying the system by loving each other can also be recognized in the characters of Winston and Julia. The notion of Newspeak in 1984 is seen again and again in Alphaville, as the vocabulary of the city’s dwellers is limited by the supercomputer, due to certain words causing emotional responses. Godard’s creation may also draw influence from Yvgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), as it describes a city encased in glass, perpetually watched by a secret police.      

Although Godard was capturing a present future, warning us of its consequences, it appears tragically ironic that shortly after, in the 1970s, the Alphaville Urbanismo Coporation in Brazil began constructing gated communities across the country. Among the 30 or so communities, The Sao Paulo Alphaville has  30 000 inhabitants, a private army of 1100, and ‘resembles its fictional namesake in elaborate and all encompassing surveillance techniques’ writes an Robert Fishman, an American professor of Urban studies. To return to the definition of utopia, the word derives from the Greek ‘eu’ (good) or ‘ou’ (not) and ‘topos’ (place)- in other words, ‘a good place that does not exist’. Its opposite, dystopia, was coined by Glen Negley and J. Max Patrick, a pair of American scholars who, in 1952, published The Quest for Utopia. In strict terms, would the antonym of utopia not be ‘a bad place that does exist’? Although many attempts at creating secluded modern day utopias, it appears that dystopias are far more frequent, and constitute the ultimate outcome of any utopia (Animal Farm).

a gated community in Brazil