ALPHAVILLE

Alphaville is a film you must watch.

Not “watch” in the conventional sense, where you passively sit and let sound and image wash over you, the type of slickly made / often entertaining mainstream factory pap that explains the plot points every fifteen minutes for anybody who went to the bathroom / checked their phone / nodded off in the interim.

“Watch” in the sense you must follow it close, actively paying attention to what unspools before you.

It is not a difficult film to follow, but you’ll be lost if you blink.

Alphaville the motion picture can be described several different ways.

One way -- the most common way, the easiest to reduce down to a simple logline -- is the producers of the Lemmy Caution movies (a European version of the Sam Spade / Philip Marlowe type of private eye character) threw caution to the wind and asked then La Nouvelle Vague wunderkind Jean-Luc Godard to direct the next installment of the character’s adventures, resulting in a weird / off beat combination of film noir and sci-fi.

This would be like the Shaft franchise asking David Lynch to direct an entry.

Another way -- and in my view, far more accurate yet more difficult to explain -- is that Alphaville is a series of discussions on philosophy / theology / poetry covered with a dream-like patina of surreal tough guy antics.

Godard, a film and pop culture maven since childhood, wisely mixes science fiction with stereotypical private eye tropes to bring these discussions to life.

The science fiction aspect is the first and foremost element, but the world of the private eye is needed to make Alphaville complete.

Science fiction enables Godard to bring deep philosophical questions up to the surface by couching them in sci-fi terms that let them be treated as concrete concepts instead of abstract ideals.

Alphaville isn’t the first film to do that, not by a long shot, but the challenge in using sci-fi to discuss big ideas is that the spectacle of the genre may overpower the theme, the form triumphing over the content.

Metropolis, as superlative as it is, is a prime example of that.

Godard’s stroke of genius lay in double filtering his message through the stereotypes and cliches of private eye fiction.  Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution is brutish and confrontational but uses that as a physical shield to protect a very human soul.  This enables Godard, through the character, to anchor the flighty intellectual aspects of the story in a grim and gritty reality that filmgoers could readily identify with.

Even at its most grim and gritty points, Alphaville continues to play with pop culture, tongue firmly in cheek in the manner in which it examines its questions, but like a prophetic parable carrying a far deeper and more profound meaning than apparent on first blush.

The plot is very pulpish, suitable for either Planet Stories or Black Mask Detective.

Caution, posing as a journalist for Figaro-Pravada but actually secret agent 003, arrives at Alphaville, the capital of a far distant planet (or galaxy; Godard either not knowing or not caring about the difference and using the terms interchangeably throughout the film).

Alphaville appears identical to Paris of 1965, and indeed references in the dialog suggest the story is taking place in the very near future.

Ostensibly there to do a story on Alphaville, in reality he’s tracking down two men:  Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), an American scientist formerly known as Nosferatu who has gone to Alphaville and established himself as the de facto human face and hands of Alpha 60, the computer that runs the society; or failing that, locating Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), a previous Earth secret agent sent after Vonbraun who apparently vanished.

Caution’s mission is to return Vonbraun / Nosferatu or kill him; his superiors are aware Vonbraun is guiding Alpha 60 to launch a massive war against the rest of the galaxy.  (Why Alpha 60 thinks this war is a good idea comprises the true heart of the picture.)

Caution is met soon after his arrival by Natacha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), a computer programmer for Alpha 60 and the (apparently adopted) daughter of Professor Vonbraun.  She unintentionally manages to arrange an encounter between Caution and Vonbraun, resulting in Caution being targeted for first interrogation then recruitment by Vonbraun and Alpha 60.

If you’ve never heard of Alphaville before this, you may be imagining this in grandiose Blade Runner style, but Godard wanted his film grounded in reality so he shot using real locations, no special effects (other than the screen images turning negative in a few instances), and no elaborate props or costumes.

Alphaville literally is Paris of 1965, and the soulless laboratories and indoctrination centers and police stations are what was then mid-century modern architecture.  

What makes Alphaville the society so alien is that Vonbraun through Alpha 60 turned the world into a completely logical / unemotional civilization.  Godard combines nods to Russian Communism, Orwell’s 1984, and French existentialism to shape the society of Alphaville, at first glance seemingly so like our world, but soon revealed in word and gesture to be radically different.

Gene Roddenberry got logical civilizations all wrong with the planet Vulcan.  A logical civilization would not become a world of high minded aesthetics but rather of haunted, empty human souls using sensuality in lieu of spiritual values.

Despite its supposedly logical / non-individualistic nature, Alpha 60 acts to preserve itself.  It relentlessly controls the population through language and censorship, hammering down any outbursts of individuality or spiritual leanings (spiritual here expanded to more than conventional religion).

This desire for self-preservation, fueled and guided by Vonbraun, manifests itself in its plans for galactic war aimed at subjugating all other planets so that they may never threaten Alpha 60 (the film leaves as a far question which came first, the egg of Alpha 60’s antagonistic plans, or the hen of the other planets sending agents like Caution to thwart them).

Godard was no computers expert and he made Alphaville long before artificial intelligence research moved from the theoretical to the practical, but he nonetheless raises an interesting issue:  Alpha 60’s oppressive nature is clearly hardwired into its cybernetics by Vonbraun, yet Alpha 60 displays enormous curiosity in the very human traits it strives to eliminate while Vonbraun feels so sure of himself as Alpha 60’s chief architect that he fails to realize his creation is truly thinking for itself, not following the guidance he programmed in.

Much of the philosophical inquiry in Alphaville centers on religion, but here Godard doesn’t use “religion” in the conventional term of a set of dogmas and creeds too often followed blindly and slavishly by the uninquisitive and the superstitious, but in the difference between philosophy and theology.

Theology is best described as a sub-set of philosophy dedicated to things of the spirit (i.e., abstract, not necessarily supernatural).  It reflects how we think and feel about unknowable and unprovable concepts. 

Philosophy and ethics can be tested; we can see if the golden rule is a viable philosophy to follow, we can judge if one view of how the world works is more accurate than another.

As stated, the key difference is that philosophy never presumes to postulate a final answer, and when it offers an insight it never claims that insight represents absolute reality.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is philosophy because it reflects a view of reality never meant to be taken literally; far too often religious devotees insist their parables be taken literally and at face value, not any deeper, more meaningful one.

Caution defeats Alpha 60 in the end by luring the computer into a trap of its own devising.  Unable to grasp why humans value love and emotion and things of the spirit, it searches for meaning where it can find none because as advanced as it is, it cannot intuitively grasp their importance.

Alpha 60 realizes it is a little tin god, and in its futile attempt to elevate itself to the next level ends up destroying the very fabric of Alphaville’s social order.

Caution drives Natacha away from Alphaville to safety in the end, cautioning her like Lot’s wife not to look back.  Natacha responds with a tentative expression of emotion:  "Je vous aime" (and notice the use of the formal vous instead of the more intimate tu, she is starting to regain her humanity but a long road remains ahead of her).

In terms of execution, Alphaville is an extremely economical looking film (as well it should be since everything was shot on existing locations using the light weight cameras the French New Wave loved so dearly).  The alienness comes across in the societal mannerisms, the elliptical dialog, and the odd juxtapositions found in the city.

Case in point:  The phrase "I'm very well, thank you, you're welcome.  Don’t mention it" is repeated frequently in the film.  

At first it sounds like a typical social bromide, but as it is used again and again it takes on a more ominous, then sinister meaning.

It is not a polite thanks and dismissal but a warning, both to others and the speaker, not to entertain certain ideas.

Alpha 60 tries to control the citizens of Alphaville by controlling the language, banning certain words, changing the meanings of others.  Characters refer to looking something up in the Bible more than once in the film, but only later is it revealed the Bible of Alphaville is a dictionary, and the salvation found within is the accepted language of the day.

The film maintains a dream-like quality throughout.  Like most dreams, it certainly carries a strong, realistic feel yet at the same time is populated by surreal events and juxtapositions.

This dream-like quality plays well off the stereotypical private eye derring-do.  Hard boiled shenanigans pop up almost randomly yet oddly not unexpectedly throughout the film viz Caution getting involved in a fist / gun fight with a hotel detective trying to spy on him as a “seductress third class” attempts to seduce him.  It’s less than a minute of wild slam bang action and then it’s dismissed as if it never occurred, with Caution and the seductress continuing their cat and mouse game.

The film juxtaposes the opulent hotel lobby where Caution first checks in with the seedy rundown hotel lobby where he finds Dickson.  The latter seems scarcely larger than Dickson’s seedy room, yet is crowded with its own staff (each engaged in some impossible to define task) and its own seductress third class waiting for clientele.

One of the most iconic scenes in Alphaville are the executions.  Rebels against Alpha 60 (i.e., people who read =gasp!= poetry) walk out on a diving board over a swimming pool and are shot while making their last statement.

As they fall in the water a line of bathing beauties dive in, swim over, and drawing knives administer the coup de grace to the victim by repeatedly stabbing them underwater.

Which, incidentally, brings us to another point we need to acknowledge:  How Godard, Alphaville the film, and Alphaville the society treat women.

From our perspective almost 60 years later, we can look back at Alphaville and excuse its depiction of women by saying it was simply parodying the style of private eye movies of the era.

Which is true…but not enough.

Both French culture at that time and movies in general did not present what we’d consider an enlightened view of gender politics, and the females of Alphaville are all there for eye candy.

In some cases it works:  The aforementioned synchronized bathing beauty executioners are so ludicrous as to be funny in a grim way, yet there are no other non-eye candy female characters to balance them out (there is a female cab driver, certainly unusual casting for a mid-1960s film, but she’s as gorgeous as all the other women).

And while one gets the idea behind each hotel employing professional seductresses (as an amenity in the world of Alphaville, as a commentary on the commodification of human relations in the film), today our reaction is more along the lines of “Is this really necessary?”

Far be it for me to tell Jean-Luc Godard how to make movies, but it seems there could be half a dozen or more alternative ideas that would get the same point across without reducing women to this role.

Even Anna Karina’s Natacha gets subjugated to this mindset, serving mostly as a tour guide until the end of the film where she finally starts engaging more directly with the central conflict.

It’s not a comfortable look today, but we can live with it when viewed as a commentary on the style of the era.  Compared with the Bond movies or almost any counter-culture film of the 1960s, it’s hardly the worst offender.

Here’s where I’m supposed to wrap things up and tell you to go watch the movie.

Okay, go watch the movie.

I’m not going to be hyperbolic and proclaim Alphaville a great movie because it’s a film set so far apart from the mainstream of cinema and the genres it mashed up that it’s not even an apples and oranges comparison but more like apples and the sound of autumn rain on the roof.

But seriously, you need to watch this movie.

© Buzz Dixon