Alphaville (1965) features scenes from Metropolis (1927), whose director, Fritz Lang, plays a film director in Contempt. In these ways, Godard’s films become intellectual essays: in them, the acted, experienced fictions of earlier motion pictures are transformed into the illustrative ideological cinema of the late…

Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) turned Paris into an oppressive metropolis on another planet, and Blade Runner (1982) created a compelling portrait of Los Angeles in the year 2019.

…Woman Is a Woman], 1961; Alphaville, 1965; Pierrot le fou, 1965), but the majority of them treated political and social themes from a Marxist, and finally Maoist, perspective (Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier], 1960; Vivre sa vie [My Life to Live], 1962; Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen], 1963; Bande à…

…French films of the period: Alphaville and Pierrot le fou (Pierrot Goes Wild), for Godard, and Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse (The Nun).