Alphaville...

I enjoyed watching this movie, maybe because it is not something I would normally pick for myself. A very wierd futuristic film by Jean-Luc Godard, it was a bit hard to understand. Godard uses shadow and lighting to set up a scary atmosphere. The music in this movie seemed quite sinister and I believe was used to help create the atmosphere, with its dramatic tones. To me it had a bit of a 'thunderbirds' feel to it where a futuristic feeling is portrayed. Also, the film has a resemblance to Orwell's '1984'.

The main character Lemmy Caution, a secret agent but instead of his normal twentieth century setting, Jean-Luc Godard places him in a futuistic science fiction dystopia, where free thought and individualistic concepts are outlawed and replaced with contradictory concepts. There is an authoritarian air about him. He seems "Larger than life". This can be shown by the fact that he won't let anyone even take his luggage when he arrived at the hotel. He is the only character to where white/light attire. He stands out because of this.

I found it interesting that the graphic nature of violence in the movie was desensitised or controlled. For example, the fight scene in the bathroom at the beginning of the movie. The sound becomes muted, the background music raised to cover that lack of sound and the character of the woman continues in the bath as though nothing is happening around her. This style of desensitising graphic violence has been adopted in recent times by Quentin Tarantino (eg: In 'Kill Bill' where bloodied scenes were desensitised by cutting to black and white or a cartoon like portrayal).

The concept of advanced technology was partly portrayed by two formulas. E = mc2 (Einsteins equation for the relationship between mass and energy) and E = hf (the formula for a quanta of energy). These would have been two very new equations for the time - the second one in particular because quantam physics was a relatively new concept of viewing the world in the 1960's. It was less than forty years old and most people would not have known what these formulae meant.

Another interest thing I found in the movie, the portrayal of things/companies such as IBM and GE as icons of the past but use the aforementioned equations as symbols of the technology of the future. And to take this one step further you can see the dated view of the movie by the fact that IBM and GE are hardware producers but in reality, the 'future' computer superpowers are in fact the software producers and not the hardware producers...

Finally, the victims of Alphaville of the re-education campaign by Alpha 60 is reminiscent of Nazism and Communism and that concept brings up an entire topic of its own that would be fascinating to deconstruct.