Alphaville (1965)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

#98: Alphaville (1965)

 

“Men of your type will soon become extinct. You'll become something worse than dead. You'll become a legend, Lemmy Caution.”

n Professor Von Braun

 

Jean Luc Godard is probably the greatest living film-maker who annoys me.

 

The single-most important figure of the French New Wave movement, roughly 1959 through 1967, but those emerging during it, kept at it, long after the semi-official ending date. His landmark cinema transformed how the whole World viewed the form. Godard was a prominent Critic before he was a working Director and laid-down the ground-work for his media Revolution by brutally dissecting mainstream French cinema's hypocritical Tradition of Quality, roughly 1949 to 1959, which emphasized craft and convention over innovation and experimentation. When he finally got behind the camera at the ripe old age of twenty-two, he rewrote the visual language, proving that the most populist of art-forms could be as intellectual as it was emotional. He liked to brag, “We barged into the cinema like cavemen into the Versailles of Louis XV.”

 

That being said, I don’t like most of his films I’ve seen. Though his breakout movie, “Breathless” (1960), marginally a Crime film about a Thug on the run who falls for the wrong girl, has a wholly captivating middle, it is sloppily executed in its beginning and ending. “Weekend” (1967), which is on some “Best Film Ever” lists, is marginally a SF film about civilization sliding into barbarism, seemed to hold the audience in smug contempt. But this one, which came between those two landmarks, and should have been insufferable, surprisingly proved to be his most approachable cinema. It’s another SF film, but more respectful to the genre than “Weekend” even though it mocks it far more openly; it does what SF is supposed to, but usually fails to do, presenting abstract ideas to the populous in an easily digestible, but still thought-provoking form.

 

“Alphaville” is a Space Opera and a Political Satire that subverts both. It is more respectful to the Satire than the SF, but it is in the SF we find all the film’s joyousness. It’s filled with wonderful visual jokes, and the first presented is the best: there are no futuristic-looking sets, props, or costumes, the Spaceship is a then-contemporary automobile, the path through Hyperspace linking the two Planets (in the film it is referred to as "Intersidereal Space") is a conventional roadway, and the future Dystopia is the unmodified streets and buildings of Paris, France.

 

The most important literary source for this film is George Orwell’s novel “1984” (first published 1949). That novel has been officially adapted to TV and film at least five times, and also ripped-off, parodied, and borrowed from by countless others. Goddard seemed to be familiar with at least some of the three pre-1965 adaptations and even as he honored the novel (that is somewhat ironic, as the novel was so furiously anti-Communist and Goddard was not only a Communist but seemed enamored of extreme Maoism) he mocked a specific adaptation, the 1954 version by Director Michael Anderson (Anderson made fine War and Action films, but always looked slightly silly when taking on the SF genre).

 

In story-structure, Goddard followed the set-up of a Ian Flemings’ James Bond film (the first novel was published in 1953, the first TV adaptation was in 1954, but the first film anyone cares about was “Doctor No” in 1962, and again, was anti-Communist), while almost all the visual touch-stones were borrowed from the even older Film Noir thrillers, which the French were absolutely gaga for.

 

Our hero is Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) who, in his fedora hat and tan-trench coat, drives from planet to planet in a 1964 Ford Galaxy, on a mission to destroy a monstrous AI, the Alpha 60 computer, that controls all of Alphaville and has eliminated all free thought and expression.

 

Alpha 60 was created by Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon) so Lemmy decides to seduce the Mad Scientist’s beautiful daughter, Natacha (Anna Karina). Natacha, quite literally, doesn’t know the meaning of the word “love,” because it has been removed from all of Alphaville’s ever-shrinking dictionaries. Though Natacha seems reasonably content in this oppressive world, Lemmy, a proper he-man, dominates her till she surrenders. As their affair violates the laws of the Totalitarian State, and both are arrested.

 

After her arrest, Natacha’s father does nothing to protect her. Von Braun is as deliberately one-dimensional a villain as you will even encounter, it’s even in his name, a call-out to Verner Von Braun, the German scientist who used slave-labor to build ballistic missiles for the Nazis and then was protected by the USA so that he could help us put a man in Space. This was part of the now notorious Project Paperclip, and much of this wasn’t actually a secret, but it also wasn’t openly discussed until after the scientist’s death in 1977. Godard shows his contempt for that hypocrisy by later revealing the character’s original name was Leonard Nosferatu, after the title character of the landmark German vampire film, “Nosferatu” (1922).

 

Lemmy is interrogated by Alpha 60 (the voice actor was not credited, but is said to have been someone who had lost his larynx and spoke through an artificial voice-box.). Lemmy recites the poetry of Jorge Luis Borges to it, and the AI has a nervous breakdown. Without their oppressor to guide them, the proletariat class of Alphaville are crippled, or as David Blakeslee recently quipped, “[A] cycle of dependency that left the city's inhabitants climbing the walls, hunched over and staggering at the end of the film after Caution's mission is completed. I have no doubt that a widespread and sustained collapse of the internet and mobile phone service would have a similar effect on large swaths of our populace today (including me.)”

 

Lemmy takes advantage of devastation to escape with the girl, but what is supposed to happen next in the society he’s just wrecked is left unclear.

 

It is parody suffused it complex ideas, especially concerning the subject of semantics. It’s like a Superhero comic book written by a Philosopher, it’s a quickly-paced adventure, inviting repeated viewings so one can further probe whatever the hell Godard thought he was talking about.

 

One in-joke needs to be explained to an audience in the USA. Lemmy Caution was not created by Godard, but a character he co-opted because the French audience was already familiar with him. In his original form, Lemmy was supposed to be from the USA, an FBI agent and later a Private Eye, but he was created by British Crime writer Peter Cheyney and somehow was more popular in France than the English-speaking world. Lemmy had never been a SF hero before this, but had been played by actor Constantine, also from the USA, in four previous films, all French language productions.

 

Constantine would later complain that “Alphaville” hurt him professionally as he was not hired to play the role that defined his career again until 1980.  I know this sounds odd, especially given that the movie was an international hit, but it’s factually correct. The cold-shoulder Constantine would receive may be related to a fraud Godard perpetrated on his investors. Godard enlisted his Assistant Director to draft a false treatment based on one of Cheyney books, the financing was based on that, but when it came time to shoot, Godard substituted him own, weird, script.

 

Constantine had the perfect look for a noir hero, second only to Dana Andrews, so international audiences knew exactly what to expect from him, a grizzled tough guy who was just as apt to use his fists as his wits to solve problems. Though Noir Heroes were required to be stoic, and Lemmy was no exception, they also needed deep lines of disappointed humanity carved into the masculine faces, this made Constantine a striking contrast to the robot-like citizens of Godard’s high-contrast, black-and-white world. Shane Wilson put it nicely:

 

“as far as Godard is concerned, Paris in 1965 already is just such a dystopia. He carefully avoids the most familiar sights of the City of Lights, using newer buildings and designs to reflect the changing soul of the city... the detective is essential as a familiar icon of a blood-and-guts world to stand up to the soul-sucking new… He is discordant just by being.”

 

An older, dirtier, more romantic, Paris only emerges with Lemmy’s rendezvous with another agent, Henri Dickson, (Akim Tamiroff), hiding out in a safe-house hovel but coming off more like a forgotten poet. They get one great scene together in which Goddard visually referenced Orson Welles “Mr. Arkadin” (1955), and Henri provides essential exposition on the film’s anti-science politics and philosophies:

 

Lemmy: “And what's Alpha 60?”

Henri: “A giant computer, like they used to have in big business.”

Lemmy: “Nueva York... IBM...”

Henri: “Olivetti... General Electric... Tokyorama... Alpha 60 is one hundred and fifty light years more powerful.”

Lemmy: “I see. People have become slaves of probabilities.”

Henri: “The ideal here, in Alphaville is a technocracy, like that of termites and ants.”

Lemmy: “I don't understand.”

Henri: “Probably one hundred and fifty light years ago, one hundred and fifty-two hundred, there were artists in the ant society. Yes, artists, novelists, musicians, painters. Today, no more.”

 

Goddard also throws in some pure silliness:

 

Lemmy: “Did they kill Dick Tracy?”

Henri: “Yes, and Flash Gordon.”

 

Throughout, Godard plays this game, with absurd scenes colliding with dense dialogue directly down-loaded from prominent intellectual writers.

 

The machine society has categorized all its inhabitants, and most of the women we encounter are “Seductress, Third Class.” After Lemmy and Henri’s exchange, one of these (Valérie Boisgel) assassinates Henri with over-energetic sex while Lemmy clicks away with an instamatic camera.

 

Earlier, the maid at Lemmy’s hotel (Christa Lang Christa Lang) proves to be one of these Seductresses, Third Class, when she shows Lemmy into his room and then wordlessly and thoughtlessly strips, she’s so accustomed to her being used for sex by strangers it has become as casual and familiar as having coffee in the morning.

 

Then there’s the vending machine that asks Eddie Constantine to insert a coin. When he does, but all it gives him in return is a card that says, “Thank you.”

 

In another scene, Alphaville’s prominent citizens gather to watch dissidents (meaning those who showed emotion) shot dead and fall into a swimming pool. Their corpses are then descended upon by shapely girl swimmers with knives for teeth like a demented Esther Williams routine. Again, Lemmy documents the atrocities with an instamatic camera.

 

But elsewhere the allegory takes a more solemn tone. Alpha, of course, is the Greek word for the letter “A” and here used as a symbol of stripping down communication to a dictatorial simplicity so that it retains it functionality but loses its capacity to share sophisticated ideas and expand the barriers of the regimented thinking. “Love” is not the only word stolen from dictionaries, "People should not ask 'why', but only say 'because.'" Pondering the purpose is forbidden, the only acceptable explanation is the one that has been pre-provided. Or as the Chief Engineer (László Szabó) puts it, “We know nothing. We record, calculate, draw conclusions.”

 

Lemmy, from a more enlightened place, talks more than the citizens of Alphaville, and the absence created by their relative silence is filled with the evidence of the machine. Given that the film avoids images of the future, the machine is mostly represented with piercing beeps and blips inserted at maximum volume. 

 

When Lemmy gets a conversation going though, he forces Alpha 60’s victims to speak of things they never vocalized before, this is especially notable in the scene where he forces Natacha to consider the meaning of forgotten love. The Detective hero doesn’t do very much actual investigating, he just pushes ideas in an oppositional manner not dissimilar to how he throws punches, until he’s finally he’s charged into the center of things. As David Blakeslee wrote, “Godard loads his characters with litanies of grand, off-the-cuff pronouncements about the progress of technology, the history of cinema, the experience of time, the nature of thought, the obstacles that prevent authentic communication, the necessity of suicide.” 

 

The philosophy comes in quick, hard, nuggets that mostly lack context (much like the film’s fight scenes) even though these are ideas themselves require some contemplation, but then Lemmy’s not a Professor, he’s a man at War, and he’s on to the next thing before we’ve digested the first. This is most apparent during his interrogation by Alpha 60 (which is more a debate than an interrogation):

 

 

Alpha 60: The essence of the so-called capitalist world or the communist world, is not an evil volition to subject their people by the power of indoctrination or the power of finance; but simply the natural ambition of any organization to plan all its actions…The acts of men carried over from past centuries will gradually destroy them logically. I, Alpha 60, am merely the logical means of this destruction.

 

…

 

Alpha 60: What transforms darkness into light?

Lemmy: Poetry.

 

What bothers me most in Goddard is his frequent pomposity, but here he manages to make it funny. Like in the above quoted dialogue between Lemmy and Henri, he misuses the phrase “light years” just as badly as George Lucas misused the word “parsec” in “Star Wars” (1977), but with the difference here is that we are confident Goddard did it on purpose.

 

No matter how much Goddard can annoy, the beauty of his films was undeniable. He and his “cavemen” in the New Wave were also consummate craftsman, their best films were flawlessly smooth products (distinguishing them from the less popular and influential Beat film makers of the USA) and though certain “mistakes” are put on display, almost always the mistakes were faked, contrivances of eyes that were well-trained before the hands touched the camera (and that, for me, made the actual sloppiness in “Breathless” much more jarring).

 

The quality of the films, over-all, seems all the more remarkable give the pace of their productions. Some of the greatest Directors were achingly slow-moving perfectionists -- one of the few women of the New Wave, Agnès Varda, was like that, but generally the New Wave guys were cranking out product at an insane fury. This may have been driven by the fact they viewed themselves as a collective, trading Writers, Directors, Cast, and Crew among them, with some individuals switching roles from film to film, so that they were not just making a lot of their own movies, they were making everyone else’s as well.

 

Probably no one was as fevered as Goddard, especially during this period. I suspect that his attraction to Pulp fiction subjects was not just a childhood love of that film and literature, but because Pulps had a clear narrative structure that proved sturdy skeleton to hang the film on, keeping it coherent while he engaged in an accelerated improvisation, make half of it up as he went along. Many of the best scenes in “Alphaville” feel as if they were invented on the spot, and very likely were.

 

The French New Wave’s official dates were a mere eight years. Goddard produced fifteen feature length movies during that time, and as I write this, he’s still making movies, though he’s slowed down.

 

He’s most beloved film that I have yet to see is “Band of Outsiders” (1964). This film was released nine months to the day after that one. If that were not impressive enough, during that nine months he also wrote the script for another feature, “A Married Woman,” which went into immediate production following “Alphaville’s” release, and was in theaters before the that year ended.

 

Part of it, of course, was that the talent around him was tremendous. The film’s score, by Paul Misraki, was rich, sinister, and romantic, flawlessly intertwining what we remember from old film noir with the jarring weirdness we expect from SF (probably not coincidently Misraki was a life-long SF fan and a UFO cultist). Cinematographer Raoul Coutard was a favorite of Goddard as well as a New Wave Director of note himself, and his instinct for light and shadow convinced you this film could’ve never been made in color. Many of the settings were deliberately, soullessly, modernistic, but with Coutrad, they are still noir.

 

An irony is that Godard’s quirkiness, where his improvisations are most apparent, is what was later borrowed was mostly by other filmmakers whose reputations were for careful perfectionism and rigorously planned execution. Much of the great SF cinema, especially Dystopian films, that came after “Alphaville” reference it in one way or other. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) borrowed the calm, disembodied voice of the monster AI. George Lucas’ “THX 1138” (1971) borrowed the abstract sound-scape of machine noises. Ridley Scott mixed old and new in creation of his own Future Noir in “Blade Runner” (1982) which created an environment so unlike to that of the novel it was based on. The Wachowskis’ boldly mixed chunks philosophical, anti-technological, polemic with action scenes in “The Matix” (1999). There are many other examples.

 

Goddard’s treatment of women in this film is pretty shabby. His other films are not nearly this crass, and there’s a certain wryness about the way he did it here, softening the misogyny with our already established expectations of a Pulp fiction. But an argument can be made that softening was really a camouflage, that the tough-guy clichés were an armor against Goddard’s own hurt.

 

One of the things about the New Wave, like most film movements was dominated by male Directors, was the exceptional beauty of the Actresses, and this is even more pronounced in Goddard’s films than others in his collective. The actress that captivated him most was his star here. Anna Karina starred in eight of his films, her presence illuminating every scene she was a part of; and even here, though she begins the film as one of Alphaville’s human Robots, she still radiates the kind of warmth and vulnerability that would tempt almost any man to put his arms around her.

 

Goddard and Karins were the most celebrated celebrity romance of their day, the talk of Paris, and they were married in 1961. She was hailed as the revolutionary Director’s muse. In a much later interview, she admitted she reveled in that title, "How could I not be honoured? Maybe it’s too much, it sounds so pompous. But of course, I’m always very touched to hear people say that. Because Jean-Luc gave me a gift to play all of those parts. It was like Pygmalion, you know? I was Eliza Doolittle and he was the teacher."

 

But the relationship was tumultuous, they fought on the set, and sometimes one, or the other, would disappear for a time. Their love affair ended in late 1964, and please note that date, because it was before this film was made.

 

The not-uncommon phenomena of broken couples managing to continue to work together in cinema has always puzzled me. Director James Cameron’s post-divorce collaborations with Director Kathy Bigelow made for great gossip. Director Dario Argento’s break with Actress Daria Nicolodi was a notably bitter one, yet he still cast her in his films, though he was also a Horror film Director, so he did have the opportunity to murder her in increasingly brutal ways and not go to jail for it.

 

In “Alphaville,” Lemmy (who was far more masculine-looking than Goddard) forcefully teaches Natacha the ways of love. Early in the film Lemmy reveals in a voiceover narration that he’s attracted to her because, “Her smile and little pointed teeth reminded me of the old vampire movies.”

 

In the last scene, as to two flee the devastated city and fly/drive towards freedom in Lemmy’s Spaceship/sedan. Twice Lemmy has to stop her from looking back, lest she turn into a pillar of salt. Then they begin to speak:

 

Natacha: “You're looking at me very strangely.”

Lemmy: “Yes.”

Natacha: “You're waiting for me to say something to you.”

Lemmy: “Yes.”

Natacha: “I don't know what to say. They're words I don't know. I wasn't taught them. Help me.”

Lemmy: “Impossible. Help yourself; then you will be saved. If you don't, you're as lost as the dead of Alphaville.”

Natacha: “I... you... love. I love you.”

 

So how much did Goddard long to hear Karina say the very words he put in Natacha’s mouth?

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQCic5WTx-o