The Unknown Florida

After the famous Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard died last September at age 91 in Switzerland, I started to re-watch some of his classic movies. Actually, I re-watched his most famous movie À bout de souffle (Breathless) from 1960 after its lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo died a year earlier in September 2021. It is still as unique, fresh, and groundbreaking as it was in 1960. It deserves to be in the Pantheon of best movies ever. And do not watch the American remake from 1983 with Richard Gere. American remakes of European movies are almost never worth your time. Anyway, I do not want to write about Breathless, I want to write about another Godard classic, Alphaville from 1965.

I do not want to give the entire plot away, but it is essentially a science fiction film noir where the citizens of the futuristic city of Alphaville are controlled by a computer called Alpha 60 which was invented by the diabolic computer scientist Professor von Braun. Alpha 60 has outlawed all illogic emotions, as for example love and compassion, and replaced them with pure rationality. People who show emotions are indicted to be acting illogically and are rounded up and executed. Ultimately the rule of Alpha 60 is brought down by secret agent 003 Lemmy Caution from the outer galaxies (played by Eddie Constantine) through citing poetry to Alpha 60. The computer cannot deal with the illogic of poetry, and thus, becomes incapacitated and ends its dictatorship over the city. Alphaville is finally free, saved by poetry!

Modern computer scientists have, perhaps unknowingly, learned from that plot. The latest incarnation of Alpha 60, an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) system called ChatGPT owned or financed by nerdy Microsoft, now writes poetry itself. Most likely, the A.I. poetry is pretty bad, just good enough to give you a passing grade in high school English, but some attack is the best form of defense! What will bring down ChatGPT? Perhaps good poetry?

Alphaville was shot entirely at night in Paris (of course in black and white) to give the city a futuristic flair without any new sets developed. Recently I took a photo at night that immediately reminded me of Alphaville. Tallahassee can look futuristic and cool!