New Wave Futures
New Wave Futures
While they were concerned primarily with the contemporary reality of the 1950s and 1960s, French new wave filmmakers also produced a speculative vision of the future in science fiction films and an untimely cinema that seems to blend the cities of today and tomorrow. In Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard imagines a dystopian and authoritarian world where futuristic technology is combined with the everyday urban existence of 1960s Paris. He suggests that this oppressive science fiction is one possible outcome of the technocratic present visible in Alphaville and examined in more sociological detail in his other films from the time. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, which stages an encounter between Tati’s old-fashioned physical comedy and the carefully planned spaces of France’s new satellite cities. Tati’s films are playful searches for the archaic possibilities that survive in this new urban realm.
Keywords: french new wave, cities, architecture, science fiction, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati
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