1960s: Alphaville

Screening + Discussion
Our pick for the 1960s

For our fourth stop in film history, we screened Alphaville—Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 sci-fi noir about a secret agent, a dystopian city, and a computer outlawing emotion. Shot in real 1960s Paris but set in a cold and coded future, it captures both the decade’s stylistic experimentation and its growing unease with control, conformity, and technology.

After the film, we stayed to talk about:
— Whether Natacha meant it when she said “I love you”
— How love in Alphaville mirrors Lynch’s women in Twin Peaks: rescued only to end up somewhere worse
— If love is enough
— Alpha 60 questioning its own existence, and how poetry destabilizes its logic
— The eeriness of its predictions around AI and emotion
— Godard’s use of genre tropes as collective myth, letting him focus on deeper ideas
— How movement and camerawork drive the film’s innovation more than the plot
— The importance of preserving emotion through art and specifically poetry
— Love as a gamble, both in story and in life
— The offscreen breakup of Godard and Karina—and how that shadows the film