Saturday, June 3, 2006
I picked up Godard's Alphaville (the first in a string of DVD rentals meant to acquaint me with some film-school-required features that I never saw when I was enrolled as a student) and I found the story's apprehension towards technology relevant to today's time.
The first shot is a blinking traffic light. Immediately we know this film has something to do with technology and how it manipulates written and spoken communication. The traffic signal is shot in extreme close-up, completely removed from exterior images that would provide meaning for the light's message. It may be telling us stop, or go, or caution, but the only definition to concretely derive is that this technology stands as a meaning for something else; seen alone as it is the light signifies the technology itself.
The film is filled with intermittent shots of signals and blinking lights like these as it follows the story of an investigator among the barcoded populace in the town of Alphaville. The film is concerned with the degradation of the written and spoken word and envisions a future where tenderness and tears are devoid in personal communication. The characters only have memories of love and feeling, and think within the parameters of mathematical axioms. They are drones in a society run by a handful of corporate conglomerates. The scenery and the characters' robotic manner of speech and gesture looks to me like a prelude to such films as THX-1138 (1971) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Alphaville's anxiety about the integration of technology with humanity is still relevant today in a time where interpersonal face-to-face meeting or written words are overshadowed by faceless media like the internet and wireless communication.
The score also struck me as reminiscent of American B-grade suspense films from the war and post-war era, and for a moment I thought it could have been lifted directly from such a film. It is, however, composed by Paul Misraki, who has quite a list of credits to his name.
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