Review of Alphaville (1965) by Bingham B — 31 Dec 2007
Like Terry Gilliam's masterpiece "Brazil", "Alphaville" is often misunderstood as a portrayal of a distant and terrifying future, disconnected from . In actuality, both films are not so much projections about far off dystopias as magnifications of our own world, retro-futurist rather than futurist, meditative rather than speculative.
No matter how many references there are to interstellar space travel and "Nueva York", Godard's film is stubbornly rooted in the reality of the mid twentieth century. All the sets are contemporary, the cars are mass produced 50's cheapies, and other than the sinister supercomputer Alpha 60, new technology is nonexistent.
Even the hero, the pockmarked private eye Lemmy Caution, is borrowed from a series of 1930's pulp novels. Godard is too worried about the present to give a moments thought to the future. Sometimes beautiful, usually terrifying, Godard's film shows us our lives in stark, cold close-up, revealing the horrors of wiring and neon that we surround ourselves with, and very occasionally, the living, breathing flesh underneath.
This review of Alphaville (1965) was written by Bingham B on 31 Dec 2007.
Alphaville has generally received positive reviews.
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