Godard fans usually swoon over Alphaville, his 1965 dystopic sci-fi romance noir, but not everyone knows about The New World, its 20-minute predecessor released two years earlier. The New World was one of four films from Ro.Go.Pa.G., an all-star collection of shorts featuring, Godard (the only Frenchman) and Italian directors Ugo Gregoretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini (the title is a combination of their names). Honestly, all of the shorts are great—Pasolini’s La Ricotta has Orson Welles playing a director reminiscent of Pasolini himself—but Godard’s is arguably the strangest and most lovely, with its non sequitur post-nuclear romance.

The plot is a little more cerebral than your average fallout dystopia: An atomic bomb explodes above Paris, but the city is left unharmed—or so it seems. Our protagonist begins to notice changes in his beloved Alessandra. She is flip, confused, and forgetful, as are other Parisians. What he first assumes are spurned affections turns out to be rapid changes in personality brought on by the bomb. Noticing the changes in himself as well, he attempts to chronicle this strange new world beset by a quiet disaster. 

Part 2 is here.