Alphaville e outros

2011, 9:18 min, color, sound, HD video, French and Portuguese with English subtitles

"Alphaville," a gated residential neighborhood in Sao Paolo, is the primary site of Muntadas' Alphaville e outros, which examines the phenomenon of "gated communities," and how fear and a search for exclusivity lead to urban isolation and exclusion. The work takes as its reference the 1965 film Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard (from which the name of the Sao Paulo neighborhood was derived), a dystopian sci-fi vision of a totalitarian, urban future. Scenes from Godard's black-and-white film are juxtaposed with near-utopian promotions for the Brazilian "Alphaville," digital animations, footage from security cameras, and images of the Sao Paolo neighborhood's pools, tennis courts and gardens. Muntadas presents an architecture of space based on the rhetoric and mechanisms of fear and control; the recurring images of massive, running fences suggest the medieval defensive walls that once ringed cities.

 
 

This work is HD video and must be shown with a 16:9, HD display.
High-Definition Video Guide