Alphaville (1965) - film review

Posing as the journalist Ivan Johnson, secret agent Lemmy Caution arrives in Alphaville to look for a renowned scientist, Professor von Braun.  Caution soon discovers that he has entered a world that is very unlike his own, one where love has been abolished and where any show of emotion is punishable by death.  The thoughts of the entire population are controlled by Alpha-60, a highly advanced computer developed by von Braun.  Assisted by von Braun’s attractive daughter, Natasha, Caution gains access to Alpha-60’s headquarters and makes a terrifying discovery.  Von Braun considers the Outside Worlds a threat to Alphaville and intends to destroy them utterly...

Even the most fervent admirers of the work of Jean-Luc Godard have to admit that Alphaville presents something of a challenge.  On the face of it, this is among the most accessible and rewarding of Godard’s films, a stylish tongue-in-cheek homage to the American B-movie which marries film noir thriller and sci-fi fantasy whilst glibly quoting from Capitale de la douleur, Paul Éluard’s anthology of surrealist poetry.  It’s mad, it’s confusing, but strangely it’s fun, like an enjoyably weird mystery tour through a deranged mind.  Watch the film a second or a third time, and it becomes apparent that there is far more to Alphaville than immediately meets the eye.  Far from the being the most lucid of Godard’s films, it is actually one of his most complex and most multi-layered - a labyrinthine, brain-stretching puzzle which admits any number of interpretations, none of which is entirely complete or convincing.  If you think you understand this, the most ambiguous and devious of Jean-Luc Godard’s films, you are probably deluding yourself.  Alphaville is an enigma, even more so than the man who created it.

At its most superficial, Alphaville is a reworking of the familiar Orwellian nightmare - a bleak Dystopian future in which humanity is under the control of a totalitarian power that has outlawed emotion, individuality and dictionaries, in fact all the things that make existence bearable and meaningful.  Here, Orwell’s vision of Thought Control is literally achieved by an all-powerful computer, Alpha-60, which appears to be able to tap into every conscious mind, and thereby monitor and control the actions and thoughts of every citizen of Alphaville (we are never certain whether this is a planet, a country or a city, but it looks suspiciously like modern day Paris).  This vision accords with a fear which many shared in the 1960s, namely the extent to which technology, in particular the prevalence and sophistication of computers, would have on humanity.  As mankind became increasingly reliant on intelligent thinking machines, was there not a danger that the human mind would atrophy, that man would cease thinking and ultimately become a mere slave to the machine?   Once computers had taken over the burden of thinking, man must surely become an unthinking drone, conforming to machine logic, having no need for such irrational distractions as art, religion and philosophy and existing only in the present, with no awareness of past memories or futute possibilities.  It is this chilling prospect that Alphaville confronts us with, and is it really so wide of the mark?  Is it not a fact that, today, most of us in the developed world spend more time interacting with computers than with other human beings?  Are we not already halfway down the road that leads inevitably to Alphaville?

Just as plausibly, Alphaville can be interpreted as a representation of the continual struggle between the two opposing sides of the human psyche, what Freud dubbed the super-ego (the higher consciousness) and the id (the sum of our repressed base desires).  The super-ego is represented as the omniscient supercomputer Alpha-60 (voiced by a man with an artificial voicebox).  The sole purpose of this machine is to abolish the irrational bestial impulses that prevent man from operating at maximum efficiency as a work unit.   Its enemy is the id, here portrayed as a gun-toting, womanising fictional goverment agent, a trenchcoat-wearing relic from B-movie potboilers named Lemmy Caution.  Caution is hardly the most flattering represention of humanity - he is a walking cliché who for the most part acts in the same automaton-like way as all the inhabitants of Alphaville.  Yet Caution is not yet entirely a machine - he can take us by surprise and do wildly unpredictable things, such as tell a pretty girl in her underwear that he doesn’t want to sleep with her.  When asked by Alpha-60 what illuminates darkness, he replies "Poetry", as if this were the only answer.  In the struggle between the super-ego and the id, the id must inevitably win, since this is where the human soul resides - love will always triumph over logic.

The most blatant inspiration for Alphaville is Orpheus’s journey into the Underworld to recover and bring back to life his dead wife Eurydice.  This is all the more evident when you watch the film back-to-back with Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1949), which Godard references on several occasions.  Lemmy Caution is obviously Orpheus, and his mission in Alphaville is accomplished once he has brought about Natasha’s spiritual renaissance, through love.  As in Orphée, the hero tells his beloved not to look back on the world they have escaped from - Alphaville represents death, an exquisitely barren purgatory which has a Medusa-like power to enchant and thereby rob a man of his soul (my guess is that Alpha-60 is a forerunner of Windows XP).  Caution’s humanity (along with an unconvincing penchant for obscure surrealist poets) protects him and allows him to bring the beautiful Natasha back to life.

It is one thing to recognise the influences in the film, be they Greek legend or contemporary concerns over the dehumanising effect of technology.  Deciding what is actually meant by it is another matter.  It is very tempting to read Alphaville as an overt attack on commercial cinema, continuing a theme which Godard had comprehensively explored in a previous film, Le Mépris (1963).  How easy it is to equate Alphaville, an over-regimented little world, cut off from the rest of creation by the barely navigable void that surrounds it, with present-day Hollywood, or rather its Godardian portrayal as a production line for mediocre pop flicks.  Anyone who fails to toe the line, anyone who dares to exhibit any sign of individuality or poetic sensibility, is shot dead or else invited to participate in a mass electrocution whilst watching a film.  It is not only people that disappear.  Words are also deleted, and so are ideas.  This is surely what must happen as cinema, arguably the most powerful mind shaper in our world, becomes increasingly formulaic and narrow in its scope.   Commercial cinema exists to make money, as much money as possible.  Therefore, inevitably there will be a regression to the mean, a convergence to a single kind of film (probably a family-friendly romcom slasher whodunnit set on the Titanic) that will consistently maximise ticket and DVD sales.  So isn’t Alphaville a warning (a caution if you will), of how sterile and meaningless cinema will become if we allow the Hollywood money men to get their way?

Or could there be a far more down-to-Earth meaning behind Alphaville?  Improbable as it may seem, the film may be nothing more than a wry commentary on life in France in the mid-1960s.  Alphaville was released in 1965, midway between Algeria gaining a hard-won independence from France and the turbulent events of May 1968.  At this time, President de Gaulle’s government was seen as out-of-touch and heavy-handed, particularly by the young, who were clamouring for change.  The deluded Professor von Braun, whose implacable face stares out from posters all over Alphaville, is de Gaulle in all but name, and if this is the case then the thought-controlling central computer Alpha-60 is almost certainly meant to represent the state-controlled television network, ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française).  The latter had a monopoly on television and radio and often exploited this to the advantage of the incumbent government.  France’s international reputation was tarnished by its failed military escapades of the 1950s and 1960s (costly wars in Indochina and Algeria), and the country was characterised as inward-looking and isolationist.  Hence, it is no great leap of the imagination to make the connection between 1960s France - politically isolated from the rest of the world and living in a cultural time warp - with Godard’s totalitarian culture-starved metropolis Alphaville.  Perhaps the main reason why the New Wave in French cinema created such a splash was because it came at a time when French culture generally was being stultified by de Gaulle’s apparatchiks in the media.  Lemmy Caution’s tussle against the controlling supercomputer and its evil creator in Alphaville seems to echo the cultural revolution that was beginning to take place when the film was made.  Indeed the confusion that erupts at the end of the film seems to prefigure the nationwide turbulence that would hit France in May 1968, when public sector workers and students decided they had had enough of de Gaulle-style repression and demanded radical social change.

Given Jean-Luc Godard’s subsequent involvement with left-wing politics and his increasing antipathy towards commercial filmmaking, it is natural to assume that these influences had some bearing on Alphaville.  Yet the film is evidently far more than a piece of political and social commentary; it is a remarkable piece of cinema art in its own right, and certainly one of Godard’s great achievements.  Although Eddie Constantine was virtually foisted upon Godard by producer André Micheli (who had the actor under contract), the director makes a virtue of necessity and gives Constantine possibly the greatest screen outing of his entire career, in the role that made him a household name in France in the 1950s.  Godard’s enchanting muse Anna Karina is also impeccably cast (as the alluring Natasha) and gives what should be rated one of her finest performances, a strangely ethereal counterpoint to Constantine’s portrayal of earthy machismo as the redoubtable Lemmy Caution.  Through his juxtaposition of familiar B-movie motifs with French surrealist poetry, Godard is once again expressing his dismay with pop culture, but in doing so he also appears to be making a more profound artistic statement, implying that even the shallower art forms have their value.  If, in navigating the convoluted highways of Alphaville, a devotee of American film noir discovers the poet Paul Éluard, that can surely be no bad thing.  And surely, the reverse is equally true.  Maybe this is what Alphaville is really about - the absolute necessity for cultural diversity, low and high art crisscrossing and feeding off one another, allowing us to better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit, a world which, thankfully, looks nothing like Alphaville - not yet, at least...

© James Travers 2011

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This movie is a fantastic film noir parody with a philosophical computer that is either asthmatic or suffering from throat cancer. In the end it is an allusion to Orfeus and Eyridice’s travel to the underworld, as well as to Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot’s wife. "Don’t look back."
Martti Ollinen (Oulu Finland) 

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