ALPHAVILLE

ALPHAVILLE follows Lemmy Caution, a trench-coated secret agent sent into Alphaville, a city ruled by a supercomputer called Alpha 60. Emotion has been suppressed. Poetry has been treated as a crime. Words disappear from the dictionary when the state decides people no longer need them. Caution’s mission is part spy story, part rescue operation, part philosophical argument with a machine that believes logic should govern everything.

Godard’s great trick is that Alphaville doesn’t look futuristic. He shot the film in 60s Paris, using office corridors, hotel rooms, neon signs and contemporary modernist architecture as if the dystopia had already arrived. No elaborate sets. This is AI imagined without spaceships or expensive machinery. Just ordinary urban space made cold by surveillance, bureaucracy and an all-knowing, all-seeing voice telling people what to do and how to think.

The film arrived at the height of Godard’s 1960s run, when he was taking genre forms apart almost as quickly as he could make them. ALPHAVILLE borrows from noir, pulp detective fiction, science fiction and political satire, then turns them into something stranger. It’s funny, dry and oddly romantic, often within the same scene.

I’m including ALPHAVILLE in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it imagines artificial intelligence less as a robot or weapon than as a system for controlling language, feeling and thought. In 1965, Godard already understood that a machine-governed world wouldn’t need to look spectacular. It could look like the city outside your window.