"Memento vivere" or how to scape from "Alphaville". Some remarks about Godard and Situationism

Abstract

Despite the insults directed by the members of the Situationist International to Godard’s cinema, there is a common theoretical field that joins them together: the critique of neocapitalism and consumer society. Godard’s work, always forged on the frontiers between document and fiction, sociological essay and poetic image, presents strong parallels with the situationist texts that denounced the enormous transformation of space, time and language in the sixties. The best example to explore these affinities is, from my perspective, Alphaville, A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution. I will therefore read this film in relation to other titles of the filmmaker so as to dwell on those issues that link it to this avant-garde and other aspects of critical thinking that have to do with the censorship of the separation and commodification of the body, as well as time in the modern world and the need to liberate life.