Alphaville

Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville was the third in our sofa-filmfest of French new wave (last weekend was Breathless), and my first impression was that it offers some fantastic examples of how to make big scifi concepts on a small budget. The plot and dialog definitely tried my patience at certain points when it got a bit too philosophical and lacking in action, but the production values were very interesting. I think there are quite a few ideas that could be used for micro-budget short films. For example, the car chase was simply a shot of two cars winding around a multistory car park taken from high atop an adjacent building. Space travel was alluded to in the dialog, but their only transport were cars. Futuristic, intergalactic architecture was actually just modern hotel locations in Paris. And it worked, somehow. Even with computer technology that appears hopelessly outdated to modern eyes, the world created is near enough to ours, that it feels plausible.