Day 25: Alphaville (1965)
Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” is science fiction stripped bare. With a weird mix of film noire, pop culture references, tongue-and-cheek futurism, and French new wave editing, the film is almost unrecognizable according to regular sci-fi standards. Instead it plays as something that openly defies genre constrictions and, in doing so, brings something new to the table. Never concerned with flashy effects or futuristic gadgets, the film deals with a future world that is much like our own and truly only dystopian in it’s viewpoint.
As we enter the city of Alphaville, we follow Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a secret agent from the “Outlands,” who’s posing as a journalist while he works on a mission to kill both the creator of Alphaville, Professor Von Braun, and his greatest creation, Alpha 60- a sentient computer who has complete control over the city. For in this metropolis, the citizens no longer express emotion of any kind, as it is illogical for human survival according to Alpha 60, and, for that reason, all material and concepts that evoke emotion (poetry, music, love) are banned, while those who use them tortured and executed.
For Caution, the trail to the center of Alphaville and Von Braun is growing hotter by the day and, with the help of Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina), a programmer for Alpha 60 and the Professor’s daughter, he will soon be able to bring the whole system down to its knees. But Alpha 60 is always watching and soon Caution finds himself deep in the computer’s clutches left with only his wits to survive.
What Godard does with this picture is film science fiction with an entirely different perspective. As mentioned earlier, the framework for the genre is ripped apart by “Alphaville” and Godard goes as far as to use the well known character of Lemmy Caution, the French equivalent to Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade, to break genre convention. In his acting career, Eddie Constantine played Caution fifteen times and all films but “Alphaville” took place in the present under strict film noire detective stories. But here, Godard throws Caution, a relic of an ancient and gritty genre, into the bright white world of science fiction and, instead of having the environment change him, he changes everyone else by eventually overthrowing his computer nemesis and using his brain, which is what all detectives use in the end, to do it.
This is what makes the film both interesting and unsettling. Just when we think the film has gone dark and gritty with film noire, it spins us on our head with French new wave voiceover techniques or a random pop culture reference. One of my favorite of these genre clashes comes when Caution is getting a tour of Alphaville’s main station, a very sci-fi experience as Alpha 60 narrates over the footage, and he suddenly meets two scientists, Dr. Eckel and Jeckel- an obvious homage to the classic 1940′s cartoon magpies, Heckle and Jeckle. As you can see, the references many times come from out of left field, giving the film that jarring, although intriguing, nature.
“Alphaville,” directed by Jean-Luc Godard and starring Eddie Constantine, is a film you must go into with an open mind. Do not expect, as I did, that you are about to witness a science fiction tale nor believe, with Caution’s fedora and trenchcoat ever present, that this is going to be a detective story. It is something entirely new, entirely unique, and entirely Godard.
To learn more about “Alphaville,” check out Criterion’s page here.
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