Science fiction, of course, doesn't have to be driven by grandes effects, by superstar names and monumental backdrops. It can be cool, dry, colourless even. The hero, in trenchcoat and fedora, traverses a lightless city. There are few others at this time of night. The familiar landmarks of the City of Light become the voice of 𝛼-60, an artificial intelligence that presides over Alphaville.

𝛼-60: “Do you know what illuminates the night?”

Lemmy Caution: “Poetry.”

– 𝛼-60 playing the imitation game with Lemmy Caution

Based on a poem by Paul Éluard, #Godard's Alphaville bears similarities with Jean #Cocteau's Orphée (1950), transported to a mirror world of sorts. It also foreshadows not only our time, but also M. Hulot's, whose #Tativille could be the simulacra of 𝛼-60's simulated, dehumanised world.

“Change your dreams, not the world.”

– Harry

A car crash on National Insurance Awareness Day (USA)

 

A couple rushing home at night hit a cyclist. Despite knowing that the man's still alive, they opt to leave the site of the #crash and never mention it again. News reports about the death of the cyclist cause a rupture; because of the couple's #class differences – she a wealthy socialite, he a former falange soldier turned university professor – because they're lovers, and because no one can know about their whereabouts on the night of the accident.

“He's still alive.”

Striking about Bardem's Muerte de un ciclista is its outsiderness in the Spanish film landscape. By adopting the visual language of both Italian #Neorealismo and Hollywood #melodrama, Bardem elegantly circumvents #Franco​ist censorship.

Posted while deciding on my film dinner. Eventually I went with Tourneur's La Main du Diable (1943).

“I don't care about your barley. Or, your vines! Or, your new terra!”

– Karen

Karen – “Karin” in the opening credits – is a displaced Lithuanian woman in an Italy-based refugee camp. She meets an Italian military man bivouacking on the other side of the barbed wire and decides to say yes when he proposes. When the newly-weds leave for home, she finds to her dismay that he's a poor Sicilian fisherman from #Stromboli; a magnificent active volcanic island home to a small Catholic parish. Again displaced, Karen is confronted with herself more than with the others that share her faith.

“Here we are, poor wretches, in this hell, Condemned to tyranny.”

– Antonio

Roberto #Rossellini's Stromboli (Terra di Dio) is a peculiar melodramatic Italian/American hybrid that seems to strongly dismiss the Italian aspect. The significance of Struògnuli – the Sicilian name for the volcano – and the people's faith connected to the volatile mountain and the surrounding sea is presented as primitive superstition. That the Sicilian dialogue – song, prayer, life – remains untranslated and the locals' broken English is used as comic relief adds insult to injury.

 

Otello Martelli's photography excels when he manages to tear himself away from Bergman's face. Only when we're confronted with the magnificence of Struògnuli, the gifts from the ocean, and the greatness of nature we'll be able to understand why the island is man's home.

Office worker Josef K. is brought to trial and at no point told what he is accused of, if anything. Orson Welles' Le procès is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's unfinished 1914/15 novel Der Prozess. The manuscript, guarded from Kafka by his friend #MaxBrod in an attempt to keep the self-doubting author from destroying his work, was against K's wishes posthumously (re)assembled by Brod without the latter knowing the intended sequence of the loose pages nor what chapters were finished.

“All these fancy electronics, they're all right in their place, but not for anything practical.”

– Uncle Max

The story holds up in its vagueness thanks to the quirks of #Kafka's Brotberuf; Franz K. was a trained lawyer, working as an insurance agent in an impossible artifice world of reports and precise wording. Within its extended logic, a man can get perplexedly lost, either within the walls of his #office or one's bed.

Inmates preoccupy themselves with making cardboard boxes. While working together, talking, gaining trust, plans for an escape unfold.

“Hello. My friend Jacques Becker recreated a true story in all its detail. My story. It took place in 1947 at La Santé prison.”

– Jean Keraudy as himself

Le trou is based on a real prison escape and introduced by one of the men involved, Jean Keraudy.

Rome's EUR was Italy's site for the 1942 World's Fair, and meant as a showcase for #Mussolini's then-20 year old fascist state. Due to the outbreak of World War 2, EUR was never used for the Fair. Instead, the Italian Republic restored the project after the war and – quite appropriately if I may say so – turned it into a business district.

“Your new society sounds charming.”

– Dr. Robert Morgan

An idealised, hypermodern interpretation of Classical Roman architecture, EUR feels alien and inhumane and serves as a perfect backdrop for the events a last man on earth may come up against.

 

Besides in The Last Man on Earth, EUR makes an appearance in Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), Bertolucci's Il conformista (1970), Antonio Pietrangeli's Io la conoscevo bene (1965), and Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect (1987).