Film Review
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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Next Jean-Luc Godard film:
Paris vu par... (1965)