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