Alphaville

Godard won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1965 for a science fiction film shot entirely in contemporary Paris with no sets, no effects and no budget for either. The trick — filming the modernist office blocks, neon corridors and underground car parks of the city at night and simply calling it the future — has been borrowed ever since, most obviously by Blade Runner and by every low-budget dystopia since.

Lemmy Caution, a pulp detective played by Eddie Constantine, who had played the same character in a series of straight French thrillers, arrives in Alphaville posing as a journalist. The city is administered by Alpha 60, a computer with a voice produced by a man with a mechanical larynx, which has outlawed emotion and removes words from the dictionary as they become unnecessary. Anna Karina is the daughter of the scientist who built it, and does not know what the word conscience means. Raoul Coutard shot it on fast film stock with available light.

It is a genre film, a poem and a joke about genre films all at once, and its central proposition — that a society can be controlled by shrinking its vocabulary — has aged into something less playful than it seemed in 1965. Godard's tenderness for the pulp material is genuine, which is what keeps it from being merely clever.