Computers are not peaceful systems

It's hard to imagine that a film like "Lemmy Caution Against Alpha 60" (the original title is "Alphaville") once won the Berlinale; her 73rd edition begins this week. Sci-fi has never been their forte, nor has action, and not a single pop band has ever named themselves after a Golden Bear recipient.

One could still be asked what happened on the jury in 1965: the juror Alexander Kluge, who had not yet made a single feature film at the time, but was already the spokesman for New German Cinema. Are you still bound by the jury secret 58 years after the decision, Mr. Kluge?

Alphaville is a Jean Luc Godard film. Almost the last with a - for all formal innovations - conventional plot before he went the way of the radical, Marxist social criticism. "Alphaville" came out a decade and a half after "1984" and is an update on the (then) latest technological development.

In the futuristic city of Alphaville and its technocratic dictatorship, the supercomputer a-60 rules. All human actions must be strictly based on logic, feelings are taboo. Words like "love" or "conscience" do not exist, in every hotel room there is the "Bible", a book that lists all permitted words. Those who use illegal ones are either driven to suicide or executed, sometimes in front of an audience in an indoor swimming pool.

Illogical citizens are put on a jump plank, blindfolded, shot in the head. If they fall into the water, women jump after them with knives and hack at the corpse. An execution, staged as a spectator sport, as can sometimes be observed in today's debates on the Internet - of course in a figurative sense. From a place called Grand Omega Minus, brainwashed agitators are sent to distant galaxies to foment strikes, student revolts and revolutions. Computers like a-60 are not peaceful systems, they do not rest until they have implemented their unassailably logical algorithms everywhere.

Secret agent Lemmy Caution (code 003, four higher than Bond) is infiltrated into Alphaville with no lesser mission than to destroy the puritanical dictatorship of the computer. In fact, the whole film is about the antagonism between logic and humanity; originally Godard wanted to call it "Tarzan vs. IBM".

The influence of Godard's film was far-reaching. The German pop band Alphaville named themselves after him, Salman Rushdie mentions him in the first chapter of "Satanic Verses", in Haruki Murakami's "Afterdark" a love hotel is named after him, a wealthy suburb of São Paulo was named Alphaville, videos and album covers imitate the prevailing ones Grayscale from Godard's film. It is shot and beaten in him vigorously. But Lemmy Caution does not win the victory over a-60 with weapons - but with poetry.