Ready-Made Dystopia

The technique of Godard's Alphaville - taking a contemporary city and emphasising the jarring, modern elements and in so doing reconstructing the city as an entirely other futuristic landscape - is totally key to the greatest moments in British film, whether the Thamesmead of A clockwork Orange* or the brutalist Gateshead of Get Carter, or even the London as 1930s Berlin of the 1995 Richard III. By keeping one eye closed when walking round a city you can replicate this yourself.



How then to take the fact that in Brazil there are thirty gated communities called 'Alphaville', each seemingly modelled after Godard's original? That in spitting distance from the favelas, their inhabitants would acknowledge that their society was already dystopian, a gated community that freely admits its own psychosis seems unusually...honest.



*Incidentally, Tavy Bridge, the central area that Kubrick used for the scene where Dim is chucked in a lake, appears to be undergoing demolition. Apparently, the 'once striking architecture with alleyways, undergound car parks and vast concrete spaces is no longer suitable for modern living'. And this is?