Hacker Cinema
Alphaville
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
1965 · Film · 99 min
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Lemmy Caution is on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of a malevolent computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s daughter Natasha, Lemmy must unravel the mysteries of the strictly logical Alpha 60 and teach Natasha the meaning of the word “love.”
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10 comments on Hacker News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) fits in there, too.
As does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor which is sort of a remake of World on a Wire(coming from Simulacron III).
Maybe not the UR, but a few years earlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film)
Hrm. All the mentions of movies with a similar* theme before, and no mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) ?
*As in AI/some supercomp ruling everything(maybe in a hidden way)
And Alphaville!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film)
What, you can't spend an hour just watching someone else's creation? Your leisure free time's too important? You gotta quick-flick-swipe through endless new distractions on the web? C'mon. Just watch an old film. Once can't hurt. Don't apply the modern bullshit standards to the past.
Alphaville. Worth a watch. Not everything has to be what you expect. Be confused. Be challenged. At least then you know someone's not making it trying to push your buttons and manipulate you. Maybe you just need to get in the moment.
There's more entropy and information in something unexpected. And how is there not something unexpected to find, something new, in even the slowest oldest film? Just watch it with focused awareness. The quality of your attention determines the quality of your experience. :P ;) xx ;p
Film Noir (which inspired Godard a lot; his 1965 film Alphaville is basically an homage/parody of it) had many of these traits (realistic dialogue, protagonists who weren't 100% good or even antiheroes, endings where the the good guys don't win) -- look at 1940s/1950s movies with Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.
Try Pierrot le fou, Contempt, Alphaville... However Breathless is (one of?) the easiest of Godard's movies.
Notice that you're supposed to suffer to watch many of his movies. It's part of the experience, to prove that you're part of the intellectual elite that "gets it".
The article didn't go into too many details about why it worked better, but these excerpts gesture at why:
"dialing up Gibson’s cyberpunk paranoia"
"the three computer graphic sections become quite coherent in black-and-white"
"it has this kind of a dreamy, 16mm feel to it. It reminds me of Tetsuo and Eraserhead, and all these great, kind of dreamy, black-and-white movies."
"the color graphics now look all pretty retro, but in black-and-white, it has its own quality to it for sure."
"I take inspiration from films like Alphaville, La Jetée, things like that"
My impression is that the color version sets an expectations that Longo never meant. It was always intended as a B&W art film, and not as a summer block-buster. The colors and expense were a distraction.
So, if you haven't yet, check out the movies mentioned. Ironman: Tetsuo, Eraserhead, Alphaville and La Jetée. They are definitely not Hollywood blockbusters.
I'd be great for retention of they could make the leases conditional on continued employment at Facebook. /s
> Google will build 5,000 homes on its property under an agreement brokered with Mountain View in December. Call it Alphabet City as a nod to Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent. The company said it was still figuring out its future as a landlord, and declined further comment.
There's no question that the Alphabet/Google company town should be called Alphaville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film)
I don't speak much French and have only spent a few weeks in the city all told, but the romanticism of Paris sometimes appears inexplicable... no thanks to writers like this! I wonder what it was like in the 1960s and 1970s? This week I finally sat down and watched Alphaville[0], a 1965 French science fiction film about a dystopian future in which 1960s computing technology (and period Parisian architecture) spawns an all-knowing, all-controlling artificial intelligence with the cunningly original scheme to supersede humans. It is full of brilliant tidbits, from memoire centrale to "I would like to telecommunicate" [...] "Local or galactic?" and perhaps proto-instagrammery if you squint right. The film is well worth a look if you're in an appropriate mood. Produced in 1965, the 1970s saw the introduction of the Concorde[1] and the construction of seedy G's[2], which now seems such a scathingly retro monument to French brutalist modernism, and yet another layer of Paris... what an interesting city!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville_(film) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_Airport