Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard 1965)
Posted on July 04 at 7.08, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
Godard’s Alphaville, shot on a very low budget in 1965 Paris, is the director’s take on Orwell’s 1984, capitalism, modernism and the eradication of free will through rationality and efficiency.
The city, beautifully shot by Raoul Coultard, is turned into a cold, modernist island where buildings of glass and concrete stand as an effigy to science and dehumanization. Most of the scenes are shot in modernist interiors and exteriors, which could have been designed by Le Corbusier himself. But Godard’s vision turns the modernist dream upside down and associates the architecture with the end of free will and the disappearance of non-conformity.
Unlike Lang’s vision of an ultra-modernist city of the future, with its skyscrapers reaching for the sky, Godard’s Alphaville is more spread out and few very tall buildings emerge. The elite continues to live in different areas of the city from the ‘little’ people, but the boundaries are less clearly defined and the sense of height as an association of power seems to dominate less than in Metropolis or even Things to Come. A man of his time, Godard seems to have been able to anticipate post-modernist concerns towards architecture and the city.
Excerpt from Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema.
My vote: 
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