Just watched Godard’s Alphaville for the second time. The first time was in a German cinema with German subtitles, at a time when I probably didn’t really speak that much German. The film makes absolutely no sense without the linguistic component – wholly dependent on dialogue. Probably unnecessary to add that it’s a great film, but I really hated it the first time round.
Is it perhaps Godard’s most classical piece of storytelling? I haven’t seen nearly all of his films, 49 is the total number I saw somewhere – and a new one coming up later this year, Socialisme – starring philosopher Alain Badiou among others. No jump cuts, no weird time maneuvers, except for the fundamental one of the whole thing happening in the future. And time being an element of the story, in as much as it seems to be the city’s or society’s ambition to become timeless – in a world where everything happens by predictable, logical order, no time goes by in our normal, catastrophic sense. That’s part of the story, however. The structure of the storytelling is absolutely traditional. Which makes it an abnormal piece in Godard’s series.
The dependency on language, even if coherent with classical storytelling, is not filmic in a classical way, however. Had Godard taken the screenplay through script doctors, without the authority of already being ‘Godard’, this would surely have been corrected. ‘Show, don’t say,’ they say.
Now, apart from all that, apart from Godard and his filmmaking, it’s kinda cute to see the worries expressed in any sci-fi or futuristic dystopia from that old century. Since the stock markets took over, computers are not used for a total organization of society, but to serve conflicting private interests and whims. But who could have thought that computers, the machinery of reason, would first and foremost be the servant of unreason, accelerating and magnifying irrationality to the brink of collapse.
As one man said, virtual intelligence must be juxtaposed to virtual stupidity, which abounds. Gigahertz upon gigahertz.
Given two options, the tyranny of rationality or the tyranny of irrationality – kind of like asking if you would rather drink a cup of blood or have seven holes in your head?
Alphaville
Just watched Godard’s Alphaville for the second time. The first time was in a German cinema with German subtitles, at a time when I probably didn’t really speak that much German. The film makes absolutely no sense without the linguistic component – wholly dependent on dialogue. Probably unnecessary to add that it’s a great film, but I really hated it the first time round.
Is it perhaps Godard’s most classical piece of storytelling? I haven’t seen nearly all of his films, 49 is the total number I saw somewhere – and a new one coming up later this year, Socialisme – starring philosopher Alain Badiou among others. No jump cuts, no weird time maneuvers, except for the fundamental one of the whole thing happening in the future. And time being an element of the story, in as much as it seems to be the city’s or society’s ambition to become timeless – in a world where everything happens by predictable, logical order, no time goes by in our normal, catastrophic sense. That’s part of the story, however. The structure of the storytelling is absolutely traditional. Which makes it an abnormal piece in Godard’s series.
The dependency on language, even if coherent with classical storytelling, is not filmic in a classical way, however. Had Godard taken the screenplay through script doctors, without the authority of already being ‘Godard’, this would surely have been corrected. ‘Show, don’t say,’ they say.
Now, apart from all that, apart from Godard and his filmmaking, it’s kinda cute to see the worries expressed in any sci-fi or futuristic dystopia from that old century. Since the stock markets took over, computers are not used for a total organization of society, but to serve conflicting private interests and whims. But who could have thought that computers, the machinery of reason, would first and foremost be the servant of unreason, accelerating and magnifying irrationality to the brink of collapse.
As one man said, virtual intelligence must be juxtaposed to virtual stupidity, which abounds. Gigahertz upon gigahertz.
Given two options, the tyranny of rationality or the tyranny of irrationality – kind of like asking if you would rather drink a cup of blood or have seven holes in your head?