Even more than half a century since its release, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville remains a profoundly chilling movie that seems all too topical. In 1965, at the peak of the French New Wave movement, Alphaville foreshadowed not a future of technological marvels but of emotional degradation. Before the terms “algorithm,” “surveillance capitalism,” or “AI” became household terms, Alphaville imagined a world in which reason rules supreme while humanity quietly dissolves.
What keeps Alphaville alive is not only its foresight but also its approach. Godard chose not to follow the typical sci-fi visuals of sets and costumes—that is, a futuristic setting—but instead shot in real-life locations throughout Paris, which was modernist at this time. Office buildings, fluorescent-lit corridors, glass-walled elevators, and hotel corridors become instead a utopia’s architecture in a way that’s terrifying only because it’s all real. This was a commercially and subversively successful move, as it won the Golden Bear award at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.
Logic as tyranny in a world without poetry
In the center is Lemmy Caution, portrayed by Eddie Constantine, who is a cassock-clad secret agent going undercover as a journalist. His mission in the city is to destroy Professor von Braun, the architect of Alphaville, as well as Alpha 60, a computer system that controls Alphaville in a ruthlessly rational fashion. In this nightmarish vision, emotions are outlawed, love is punishable, and poetry is considered a disease.
Godard depicts Alphaville as a dictatorship of technocrats, where language becomes a weapon in itself. Words of emotion are purged from dictionaries, which are updated daily like scripture. People with emotional reactions are put to death, usually through elaborate announcements of execution that make killing a mere formality. Even revolt has become a function of Alpha 60, which exports disorder into competing civilizations, sending out agents to stir up turmoil under the guise of logic.
Indeed, the choice of Constantine as a character embodies the intention to subvert the genre. Constantine, prior to Alphaville, represented the more traditional detective film genre, exemplifying the hard-boiled male protagonist, who can solve problems by brute force, fists, and guns. Godard supplants this traditional character into a world where such solutions are irrelevant. Lemmy, the protagonist, can’t rely on Alpha 60 physically; he must rely on his intellect. However, the most extreme deviation from tradition appears in the latter stages of this film, where Alpha 60, the major antagonist, succumbs not to force but to poetry, to a question the machine can’t solve.
The abstract struggle finds a reality through Natacha von Braun, portrayed by Anna Karina. The character’s awakening to love ends in the final line of this film: “Je vous aime.” It’s a gesture that’s almost a revolutionary action. In Alphaville, mankind lives by emotion rather than by progress. These days, as we find ourselves being shaped by the influence of artificial intelligence and algorithmic logic in our own behaviors and patterns of thought, Alphaville finds itself less like sci-fi and more like a warning that has been called upon far too early. This is because the strength of Alphaville is the reminder that an emotionless future is not an advanced future but an empty one.
