Alphaville - Godard pic.twitter.com/9Ahom89TJK
— Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) September 25, 2022
The assisted passing of director passing of Jean Luc Godard caused me to revisit his fantastic 1965 film, Alphaville. One of my favorites. A science fiction film that made a better shot at seeing the future than most. It's sometimes slapstick episodic collection of modern architecture, noir film riffs, and poetic dialog - some garnered from the work of Borges - is nowhere else surpassed. Godard considered calling the movie "Tarzan vs. IBM."
The world in which I grew up was the future, funnily enough, in retrospect. Alphaville is a city that central figure Lemmy Caution goes to, perhaps to destroy. A technocrat leader has taken over there and human feeling is suppressed. Here is some dialog delivered voice-over in parts drolly in the style of Bogart's Maltese Falcon. Lemmy played by Eddie Constantine is in conversation with skidrower Henri (played by familiar Hollywood character actor Akim Tamiroff} goes with the picture above. Discussed - as Henri lurches toward suicide) is the computer brain that runs things >>>
"A giant computer
like they used to have in big business.
New York .. IBM .. Olivetti ...
General Electric ... Tokyorama.
Alpha 60 is 150 Light Years more powerful.
I see.
People have become slaves of probabilities.
Their ideal, here in Alphaville,
is a technocracy,
Like that of termites or ants."
The NCR304. This was the first computer I ever saw. At S.C. Johnson's in Racine, Wisconsin. They'd been customers for NCR accounting machines. pic.twitter.com/MRaffKai1Y
— Jack Vaughan (@JackIVaughan) September 13, 2022
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