Streaming Thoughts: Alphaville
Oct. 30th, 2023 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHappening on a movie I want to see in the assortment of streaming services I can access can feel a stroke of luck. When I came upon Alphaville on Kanopy, made available through a library in my area, that got my attention. Quite a while ago I read Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, and some of the reviews mentioned Alphaville in the context of HAL 9000’s voice. Some time after that, Rick Worley’s “How to Watch Star Wars” included a good number of clips from the movie, at once suggesting it was another film Star Wars quoted and it quoted other works itself. I am conscious that in being more aware of Alphaville as “science fiction” than as “a film by Jean-Luc Godard” I might be out of my depth in trying to discuss it. At the same time, it was intriguing.
I’d known Alphaville uses mid-1960s settings and calls them a distant planet (Rick Worley compared this to the settings of THX 1138). With the time that’s passed since then I did wonder if this might help make it look more distinctive again, but noting all the modern architecture had some definite interest too. There might have been some thoughts (perhaps even unfair thoughts) of “the simplistic sets of ‘old science fiction movies.’” I suppose I did get to thinking of the civilian clothing in the twenty-first century’s Battlestar Galactica, and of the Free Planets Alliance in Legend of the Galactic Heroes too. Perhaps there were some thoughts of “calling things something else” in childhoods once upon a time, too.
Dealing with the computer-controlled dystopia in Alphaville wasn’t all that difficult, although there’d been some striking developments along the way there. With its conclusion calling “driving away” “heading through outer space,” though, I did think a bit of how later science fiction might insist “Earth is room enough,” whether insisting on the actual difficulty of space travel or how much science-beyond-science would transform everything else. That this movie was more casual about things did appeal in its own way.
I’d known Alphaville uses mid-1960s settings and calls them a distant planet (Rick Worley compared this to the settings of THX 1138). With the time that’s passed since then I did wonder if this might help make it look more distinctive again, but noting all the modern architecture had some definite interest too. There might have been some thoughts (perhaps even unfair thoughts) of “the simplistic sets of ‘old science fiction movies.’” I suppose I did get to thinking of the civilian clothing in the twenty-first century’s Battlestar Galactica, and of the Free Planets Alliance in Legend of the Galactic Heroes too. Perhaps there were some thoughts of “calling things something else” in childhoods once upon a time, too.
Dealing with the computer-controlled dystopia in Alphaville wasn’t all that difficult, although there’d been some striking developments along the way there. With its conclusion calling “driving away” “heading through outer space,” though, I did think a bit of how later science fiction might insist “Earth is room enough,” whether insisting on the actual difficulty of space travel or how much science-beyond-science would transform everything else. That this movie was more casual about things did appeal in its own way.