SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
Alphaville is the story of special agent Lemmy Caution, played by American actor and naturalised noir icon Eddie Constantine, who has voyaged (in his white Ford Galaxy) across time and space to Alphaville, the capital city of a distant planet. His mission: to bring back the scientist Professor von Braun. The Professor, however, has since become king of the city by creating Alpha 60, the computer that controls Alphaville along harsh technocratic lines: weeping is outlawed and poetry goes unrecognised, words such as conscience and love have been erased from the lexicon. Add to this Anna Karina as Natacha von Braun, daughter of the Professor, who is loved by Lemmy; Constantine’s whisky-drinking, poetry-spouting, outrageously overdetermined hard man of a special agent whose fight sequences, as Wim Wenders noted in his essay on the actor, ‘are like dance sequences in a bad musical’; and Raoul Coutard’s cinematography, the luminous opposition of its Expressionist black and white matching the film’s abstract absolutes of good and evil, love and death, conscience and technology, poetry and science. Plus, of course, Paris.
Alphaville is Paris, 1965. Or rather, Paris 1965 is Alphaville, a modernist nightmare of post-Bauhaus functionalism where the curtain-walled skyscraper becomes the simultaneous symbol of progress and apocalypse. With Alphaville the nouvelle vague aesthetic of shooting in the streets reaches an apotheosis. Alphaville’s is a short-circuited realism applied to the least likely of genres – science fiction – that serves to make strange a real already so strange that it positively demands the strategy.
Part of the modernity of the nouvelle vague can be attributed to the use of new lightweight Éclair cameras and Nagra sound-recording technology to bypass the convention of studio-based shooting associated with the despised cinema de qualité. This allowed the new filmmakers to take to the streets and boulevards, quartiers and apartments of the real city, all the better to mythologise its historic centre. In the January 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the young Bernardo Bertolucci wrote of Godard’s ‘vulgarity’ adding that for him this was a positive quality: ‘I call ‘vulgarity’ his capacity and his ability to live day-to-day, close to things, to live in the world as does a journalist, always aware of the right time to arrive on the scene.’
The characterisation was to stick – Godard the modernist exotic, fascinated by the surfaces, sounds and shapes of modern Parisian life but not by its substance. It was a barely veiled accusation of profligacy of style and theme, of bad taste, of formlessness and lack of aesthetic harmony – forgetting that in Godard’s case the old rules simply don’t apply and never did.
The ‘blurring’ of Paris in the cinema of the nouvelle vague is a chronicle of the incursions into the city centre of modernist architecture and of the cultural ascendancy of Le Corbusier and the International Style. As a result, the characters lose their bearings – and worse their love of the city. It is just such a fear that informs Alphaville’s image of an architecturally brutalist future world in the heart of the city. In its despair over 60s urbanisation, Alphaville was part of a wider concern about the perceived dehumanising effects of mass-scale housing and the contemporary renovation of the city.
Chris Darke, Sight and Sound, July 1994
‘Alphaville’: a contemporary review
Like The Red Desert, Alphaville is concerned with alienation in a technological society – Natacha is a robot restored to humanity by Lemmy’s love – but Godard’s method is far removed from Antonioni’s minute, patient analysis. There are times, Alpha 60 gratingly announces at the beginning of the film, when reality is so complex that it can only be transmitted through legend; and Godard accordingly proceeds to work through legend, or two legends, to be precise. There is the legend of Lemmy Caution shooting up his opponents and winning the pretty lady with the traditional, uncomplicated, strip-cartoon brutality; and there is also the poetic legend of Cocteau. It is no accident that echoes of Cocteau’s work abound here: Lemmy’s interrogation by Alpha 60 recalls the tone and style of Cégeste’s aphoristic poetry (‘Quel est le privilege des morts ?’ Ne plus être vivants’); when Alphaville is destroyed, people stagger down labyrinthine corridors or cling blindly to the walls, like the inhabitants of ‘La Zone de la mort’; and at the end, as they escape from the city, Lemmy tells Natacha, like Eurydice, not to look back.
It is through this curious marriage of legends that Alphaville makes its comment: in a world rendered arid by technology, it is left to the brutal, matter-of-fact Lemmy to take over the mantle of Orphée and recall the existence of poetry; and in the beautiful central sequence of the film, the illogicality of poetry is born again as Lemmy forces Natacha to seek for the meaning of forgotten words like ‘tenderness’, ‘conscience’ and ‘love’. It isn’t so much that Lemmy (God forbid!) is poetic – his dialogue and thoughts for the most part remain characteristically monosyllabic – as that he alone in Alphaville is aware that neither he nor anybody else can live in a world deprived of poetry and feeling.
Without benefit of special lighting or trickery, Paris stands for Alphaville simply by having Coutard’s superb photography present an icy, dehumanised view of it as a city of glittering lights and staring windows, a warren of push-buttons and heartlessly clicking machines in which Natacha, wide-eyed and hesitant, presents the one source of warmth. This is a world in which one cannot trust appearances, and Godard invents the perfect human detail to go with it: the hotel chambermaid (‘Séductrice, Troisième Classe’) with the identification tattoo on her neck, making guests comfortable by putting tranquillisers in the bathroom and stripping invitingly to her underwear; the down-and-outs squatting in the suicide hotel on the other side of town, nibbling cereals out of the packet; bored guests politely applauding executions at the municipal baths, while a bathing belle-executioner acknowledges their tribute with a graceful arabesque in the water. Alphaville, in fact, is the first science fiction film to offer the uneasy reminder that our own world is already more than halfway to science fiction.
Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1966
Alphaville
A new film by: Jean-Luc Godard
Production Companies: Chaumiane Productions, Filmstudio
Assistant Directors: Charles L. Bitsch, Jean-Paul Savignac
2nd Assistant Directors: Hélène Kalouguine, Jean-Pierre Léaud
Creator of Lemmy Caution: Peter Cheyney
Director of Photography: Raoul Coutard
Props: Joseph Gerhard, Pierre Clauzel
Costumers: Laurence Clairval, Yvonne Garetier
uncredited
Producer: André Michelin
Production Manager: Philippe Dussart
Unit Manager: Maurice Urbain
Administration: Henry Dutrannoy
Production Secretary: Jeanne-Marie Liron
Trainee Director: Jacques Barzaghi
Script Supervisor: Suzanne Schiffman
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Camera Operator: Georges Liron
Camera Assistant: Jean Garcenót
Key Grip: Bernard Largemains
Supervising Gaffer: Fernand Coquet
Stills: Marilù Parolini
Editor: Agnès Guillemot
Assistant Editor: Delphine Desfons
Make-up: Jackie Reynal
Hairstyles: Lionel
Music: Paul Misraki
Sound: René Levert
Cast
Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution)
Anna Karina (Natacha von Braun)
Akim Tamiroff (Henri Dickson)
uncredited
Howard Vernon (Prof Léonard Nosfératu/von Braun)
László Szabó (chief engineer)
Michel Delahaye (Von Braun’s assistant)
Jean-André Fieschi (Prof Heckell)
Jean-Louis Comolli (Prof Jeckell)
Christa Lang
Jean-Pierre Léaud
France-Italy 1965
99 mins
Digital
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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