ALPHAVILLE (1965):Starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina,
Akim Tamiroff and Howard Vernon
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
(100 minutes) B&W
(French w/ subtitles)
The private detective comes to town, seeking some truth. As usual, he's the outsider, but in Alphaville no one appears to pay him much mind when he starts snooping around, making inquiries, taking pictures. In Alphaville no one questions anything.
Its motto -- "Science Logic Security Prudence" -- represents their way of non-life, monitored and controlled by a central computer. The scientist who created the computer reasoned that people have become slaves of probability, so he concluded: for perfection to exist you need to weed out the factors that could cause improbables.
Regularly scheduled executions handle the weeding. Capital crimes include not only reading poetry, but showing emotion -- like shedding tears over your wife's dead body. The dictionary (in Alphaville called "The Bible") arrives in new editions every morning without certain words that were there the day before. ("So no one knows the meaning of the word' conscience' any more. Too bad...") There is no "day before" or "day after." Only the present exists. The past is a memory that can only cause sorrow and pain, while thoughts of the future -- perhaps the most unwanted improbable of all here -- might create a hope for something better than today.
That the hope is always there is the truth they and their computers cannot compute and can never delete.
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