Alphaville (1965)

Alphaville arrives from 1965, a French New Wave tech noir in which a trenchcoated American agent named Lemmy Caution drives a Ford Mustang into a city ruled by a computer called Alpha 60. Paris stands in for the future. No sets were built. The modernist glass and concrete of the mid-sixties serve as the architecture of a technocracy that has banned love, poetry, and the word why. The film took the Golden Bear and has aged into something close to prophecy, though the prophecy concerns bureaucracy and machines, not any cause the present decade would recognize.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the ledger is bare. The cast is white, European, and drawn from the director's usual circle. No character's identity is interrogated, celebrated, or announced, and race goes unmentioned throughout. The environment is not a concern, since the villain is a mainframe and not an oil company or a landlord, and the film's contempt is aimed at logic itself instead of at wealth. Natacha von Braun operates the computer and gradually learns what a self is, which is a genuine arc, but she spends most of the running time being instructed by a man in a fedora. There is no body politics, no neurodiversity, no rewriting of the historical record. Godard is many things. A modern sensitivity workshop is not among them.

The lone register that flickers is the talk. Alpha 60 speaks in a guttural growl about the abolition of contradiction. Caution answers with Éluard and Baudelaire. Two lectures, opposed, delivered at length. The sermonizing is metaphysical, occupied with consciousness and poetry, and it never once addresses a social grievance in the current idiom. A viewer seeking instruction on how to live will find it. A viewer seeking instruction on how to vote will not. The machine dies from a riddle. That remains the most honest political statement in the film.