ALPHAVILLE Future Shock Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

FOMO Cinema Presents: Future Shock

A week of rogue machines, unstable realities, artificial intelligence, cybernetic bodies, corporate paranoia, cosmic dread, and a very cranky robot policeman.

This program traces a century of cinema asking the same uncomfortable question: what happens when human intelligence develops an Artificial Intelligence it can’t fully control?

The answer, judging by this week’s films, is never good.

ALPHAVILLE

Jean-Luc Godard | 1965 | France / Italy | 1h39m | Presented in the original French audio with English subtitles

ALPHAVILLE follows Lemmy Caution, a trench-coated secret agent sent into Alphaville, a city ruled by a supercomputer called Alpha 60. Emotion has been suppressed. Poetry has been treated as a crime. Words disappear from the dictionary when the state decides people no longer need them. Caution’s mission is part spy story, part rescue operation, part philosophical argument with a machine that believes logic should govern everything.

Godard’s great trick is that Alphaville doesn’t look futuristic. He shot the film in 60s Paris, using office corridors, hotel rooms, neon signs and contemporary modernist architecture as if the dystopia had already arrived. No elaborate sets. This is AI imagined without spaceships or expensive machinery. Just ordinary urban space made cold by surveillance, bureaucracy and an all-knowing, all-seeing voice telling people what to do and how to think.

The film arrived at the height of Godard’s 1960s run, when he was taking genre forms apart almost as quickly as he could make them. ALPHAVILLE borrows from noir, pulp detective fiction, science fiction and political satire, then turns them into something stranger. It’s funny, dry and oddly romantic, often within the same scene.

I’m including ALPHAVILLE in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it imagines artificial intelligence less as a robot or weapon than as a system for controlling language, feeling and thought. In 1965, Godard already understood that a machine-governed world wouldn’t need to look spectacular. It could look like the city outside your window.

FOOD AND DRINK POLICY: FOMO Cinema Lounge Bar opens 1 hour before the first screening of the day and closes at 02:00,.serving a wide selection of beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic refreshments including coffee and tea, as well as fresh hot popcorn! Outside food is allowed in the bar but not in the cinema. No alcohol from outside allowed. All guests are invited to arrive early and stay late!

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to Level 1. Signage on the door. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/