Campo de Relámpagos presents ‘Alphaville e outros’ by Antoni Muntadas
Alphaville e outros by the artist Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), is the seventh installment of the new cycle 'Machines of vision', from the magazine Campo de Relampagos focused on presenting pieces that unveil the narrative devices of cinema and that establish relationships parental with other authors and languages.
Muntadas builds here a polyphonic narrative in which he establishes parallels between the film Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard (1965) and the promotional images and field shots of the housing complex of the same name in São Paulo, Brazil. This stands as one of the "fortified enclaves scattered throughout the metropolitan region of São Paulo and also around the world" -according to Teresa Caldeira in her essay Walls and new technologies of the public.
In the Muntadas film the screen breaks and divides, without losing the thread, between the virtual reality with which the housing complex is promoted, the concrete reality of urban development and the dystopian reality of the Godard film. In the same way, the audio is leading us through these realities without losing the sense, jumping from the couple's dialogues, the music and the narrator's dysphonia in Godard's film, to the "airport" environmental music and to the voice Tersa that promises paradise in the advertising campaign of the Alphaville complex. We feel, through this shift between different spaces, that we are facing the same scenario: the control mechanisms and the privatization of public space, the standardization of the concept of "living" and, finally, poetry and love as forms of resistance .
http://campoderelampagos.org/maquinas-de-vision
