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

Present Future(s)

The representation of futuristic society through the use of existing buildings

GATTACA (1997), Andrew Niccol

GATTACA is a 1997 science fiction film directed by Andrew Niccol.

The baseline of its plot draws on characteristics of biopunk, the subgenre of cyberpunk, as it describes a society in which humanity is divided into two groups: invalids, or individuals conceived through traditional means and valids, “superior beings” conceived through genetic manipulation.

The story follows the character of Vincent, an in-valid, who dreams of entering the space program, to become an astronaut. Although law forbids genetic discrimination, a person’s genotype will be responsible for his social integration and professional success. Naturally, Vincent is forbidden from entering the space agency GATTACA, and decides to become a “borrowed ladder”, the name given to in-valids who use the identity of “valid” members of society, in order to achieve his dream.

In the film, the description of futuristic society is done through the creation of an introvert society. A microcosm, making use of very few main locations:  

The Marin County Civic Center, in San Rafael, by Frank Lloyd Wright  (GATTACA space agency)

the Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, by Eliot Noyes (parking lot)

the CLA Building, in Pomona, by Antoine Preock (Vincent Freeman’s house).  

The Sepulveda Dam and the solar power plant at Kramer Junction Solar Electric  Generating Station are two additional locations used in the story to create some sense of an ‘outside world

What we can first see is that no architectural spaces or horizons are creating through CGI. The realism is therefore unquestionable, and yet the spaces themselves are deeply awesome. Quite like Godard’s 1965  Alphaville, Niccol decides to film a future that is already happening, as the notion of ‘building a future’ is alien to him. Vivian Sobchack refers to the dilemma that is central to the genre of science fiction as “a tension between those images which strive to totally remove us from a comprehensible and known world into a romantic poetry and those images which strive to bring us back into a familiar and prosaic context”.

Interestingly enough, it appears that the locations of GATTACA play a double role of launching us off into an alien and astonishing world and yet also bring us back into a familiar context due to their real existence.

The architecture in GATTACA is of a timeless nature. Indeed, the dominating styles are post-modernism and brutalism. It is the absence more than the presence of materials that make architecture timeless. It is the time in which one lives that will attribute its own meaning to architecture that appears somewhat uncorrupted. It is for such a reason that the Marin County Civic Center by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Sepulveda Dam can be used for any time period. It is worth mentioning that George Lucas also used the County Civic Center when filming THX 1138 due to its sterile nature and highly organised layout. The geometry of the buildings in GATTACA is also used for symbolic value. Indeed, the helix staircase spells out the main theme of the film: the DNA strain.  

The continuous corridors, curved barriers, circular structures reveal the perfection of man’s ‘hand’. 

The question of whether or not we are seeing a utopic or dystopian society is regularly challenged in the film. Indeed, in science fiction cinema, futuristic society has often been portrayed as a closed space, normally due to a limited production budget. However, one may suggest that the limited space of the futuristic ‘world’ has much in common with the original 1516 description of ‘Utopia’, by Thomas More. He described a closed fictional island society, composed of 54 identical cities. Perhaps it is therefore not interesting to argue whether or not GATTACA is placed in a utopic or dystopian world, but rather how Niccol creates its boundaries.

Unlike Eon Flux (2005) , where the Eden-like city is limited by a giant concrete wall, the boundaries in GATTACA are much more obscure. The reoccurring similar screen shots on locations augment our sense of closed space, but it is ultimately the actions of the characters that make us understand. Similarly to the Truman Show (1998), the sea is the first limit to the world of GATTACA; space also appears to be a limit that Vincent ultimately breaks through. The character of Jerome Morrow, the handicapped ‘valid’ who sells his identity to Vincent, finds his escape from the world through death.

The notion of purity and sterile environment is what seems to best characterize the story in GATTACA. It is also one of the main characteristics we associate with an ideal futuristic society, questionably in regards to the desire to sterilise human nature:

Director Josef: You keep your work-station so clean, Jerome.

Vincent: It’s next to godliness. Isn’t that what they say?

Drawing of main avenue of elite city, Fritz Lang's Metropolis