France science fiction
1965
bw 99 min.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1426L
DVD: $29.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # ALP030DVD
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
When Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville opened the 1965 New York
Film Festival, the American Civil Liberties Union Benifit audience
seemed genuinely baffled by the abrupt shifts in tone: from
satirically tounge-in-cheek futurism, to a parody of private-eye
mannerisms, to a wildly romantic allegory depicting a
computer-controlled society at war with artists, thinkers, and lovers.
Alphaville is science fiction without special
effects. Godard couldn't afford them in 1965 or ever, but he probably
wouldn't have wanted them even if he'd had unlimited financing. His
whole theme, imagination versus logic, is consistant with his
deployment of Paris as it was in the '60s--or at least, those portions
of Paris which struck Godard as architectural nightmares of
impersonality. Sub-Nabokovian jokes on brand names abound. There is
much talk of societies in other galaxies, but the only manifestation
is the Ford Galaxy that Eddie Constantine's Lemmy Caution (a low-rent
French version of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe) moves about in. Most
of Alphaville in nocturnal or claustrophobically indoors. Yet
there is an exhilarating release in many of the images and camera
movements because of Godard's uncanny ability to evoke privileged
moments from many movies of the past.
Alphaville was never meant to shock, depress, or disgust,
and thus it seems as decorous and decent in 1995 as it did in
1965. And it is the work of one man, one recognizable man, not the work
of a cynical, calculating committee. Indeed, the computer controlled
villians in Alphaville bear more than a passing resemblance to
the bottom-line driven villians in the motion picture industry. To
understand and appreciate Alphaville is to understand Godard,
and vice versa. The shapely girl swimmers with knives for teeth and
shark-like instincts for souls are an expanded version of Alexandra
Stewert's bikini-clad shark in the Godard episode of RoGoPag,
the episode Lincoln Center audiences hissed violently in 1963. Also
from RoGoPag are the pills the population of Alphaville gobbles
up like peanuts to retain tranquility in the absence of recollection.
The Welles influence, particularly from Arkadin, is
reflected in the free-wheeling performance of Akim Tamiroff amid the
swinging light bulbs of Wellesian expressionism. The references to
Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are pure comic strip pop, and the
reference to relativity and the SS pure comic angst.
Godard, the celebrated enfant terrible of the nouvelle vague,
shamelessly parades Anna Karina, the greatest love of his life among
his several Galateas (Jean Seberg in Breathless had been one of
the first). Karina plays Natasha Vonbraun, the daughter of Professor
Vonbraun (the whimsical fusion of a Tolstoyen first name and a Nazi
rocket-scientist last name is typical of Godard's irreverent
plauge-on-both-your-houses attitude toward the Cold War). This love of
Karina is on display with Godard's love of movies. Cameo appearances
by Jean-Andre Fieschi as Professor Eckel and Jean-Louis Commoli as
Jeckel represent a combination of two of Godard's successors on the
staff of Cashiers du Cinema with two Hollywood animated cartoon
figures.
One may quibble over the fallacy of expressive form in illustrating
computer control through the rasping-gurgling sounds of a man who has
lost his voice box. Technological totalitarianism could certainly have
come up with a more beguiling tone with which to seduce its
subjects. Nonetheless, I am more moved today than I was in 1965 by
Godard's temerity in having Karina sum up the moral of the film with a
deliberately intoned reading of the line, "Je vous aime."
There is a moment of weary acceptance in Alphaville when
Eddie Constantine, his face fading into the shadows, acknowledges that
it is fate to become a legend. It is an image of intellectual heroism
and self-recognition such as I have seldom seem on the screen. And in
one flash, Godard illuminates one of Constantine's most memorable
responses to one of the computer's questions in an earlier
sequence. "What transforms darkness into light?" Constantine is
asked. "La Poesie," he replies. That a semi hoodlum should be capable
of such articulated sesitivity seems unlikely, but no more unlikely
really than the ability to join comic strips and love sonnets with a
single sensibility.
You don't have to be French to ejoy Alphaville. But you have
to love movies with high-minded seriousness.
-- Andrew Sarris