Alphaville

Alphaville

Alphaville was a science fiction film made by Jean-Luc Godard in 1965. It’s not widely known but it had a big influence on other movies of its time. This movie is a combination of different types of films such as film noir, social satire and tough guy movie. These genres were mixed together to create one story set in a world that never has daylight.

The name Alphaville comes from the name of the city where the story takes place which is also called Alphaville and it is a technocratic dictatorship. Recently restored, this disorienting and sometimes eerily quiet film seeks to hypnotize its viewers into a dreamlike state through repeated deep-voiced narrations over alternating black screens with flashing lights in close-up.

Like many great sci-fi films, Alphaville is more about creating an experience or vibe than presenting any clear philosophical or political ideas. And like most predictive works from its era, it’s not nearly as interesting for what it says about our future now that we live there than for how well it captures fears and curiosities particular to its moment (though I should note that at least one fear expressed within the main plot does seem chillingly prescient today; namely: what if computers become sentient and take over everything?).

Misogyny can be found in crime or detective films as well as counterculture fables. In this movie, women are only thought of as plotters, temptresses and people who need to be taught and saved although like women in many scripted Godard movies, they look so great and carry themselves with such aplomb that they become vital forces anyway. (A guy dies while having sex with a “Third Class Seductress.”)

Eventually Lemmy team up with Natacha von Braun, played by Godard’s muse Anna Karina, an Alpha 60 programmer and the daughter of Professor von Braun; they fall in love even though she says she doesn’t understand love or conscience or anything like that, and even though poetry and emotion have been banned by the computer overlord of Alphaville. James T. Kirk got into this kind of jam on “Star Trek” too.

Lemmy’s impulsive, macho approach is a danger to the new status quo; his meathead roughness represents the humanity that’s about to be deprogrammed from the species. (The Hollywood movies of the ’40s were better at this stuff than most; even when their stories were primarily driven by ambitious macho men, they let their femme fatales and even their “honey trap” minor characters have a bit of psychological depth.)

Lemmy is a film buff’s construct who embodies the French New Wave critic-filmmaker’s academic-intellectualized interpretation of American genre films twenty years earlier. Though Lemmy is drawn from a character created by Peter Cheyney whose stories were set in the modern day, Godard & Constantine’s film incarnation imagines Lemmy in future times but keeps the ’40s tough-guy affectations and storytelling beats intact. The result is a sci-fi version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as played by Humphrey Bogart in the black and white classic “The Big Sleep,” right down to the brusque attitude, cutting wisecracks, and “I work alone” ethos. But he’s much wearier and less glamorous. And he captures some essential, true quality of World War II veterans in the 1960s when most veterans were in their forties. (“Alphaville” presents Lemmy as a veteran of Guadalcanal even though it’s set in the future.)

The character’s ingrained cynicism connects “Alphaville” to the sociocultural subtext of film noir, which expressed some of what the world was feeling after having to confront mass slaughter in Europe, the Pacific, the camps, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then resume “normal” life. The fear that everything and everyone are being mechanized, plasticized, packaged and controlled was a common theme in mid-twentieth century fiction and film from Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical science fiction novels to movies like ‘The Stepford Wives,” ‘THX-1138″ and the original “Westworld.”

At about this time in our culture’s development, if I’m not mistaken (and I might be), our military was contracting with RAND to apply computer science to foreign policy and warfare. (The corporation is name-checked in another iconic film from this era, “Dr. Strangelove,” whose Henry Kissinger-inspired title character boasts about his association with “The BLAND Corporation.”)

Fans of both “Blade Runner” movies as well as visionary sci-fi fantasies like “Brazil” and “Dark City” will detect seeds of those future works as well as others in “Alphaville,” particularly but not exclusively its way of telling a story: drifting from scene to scene and set piece to set piece often with so little connective tissue that when the movie does plant its feet and decide to focus on plot, it’s almost as if an obligation is being satisfied.

(Psst! You want a storyline? Okay, here it is.) The exposition is often this same and that same and those technical terms and names crammed in the whole thing sounds like doubletalk or a Marx Bros. routine, such as Orson Welles’ version of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which came out three years before “Alphaville.”

It’s all dream logic. Lemmy and Agent Dale Cooper from “Twin Peaks” would have had a lot to talk about, especially regarding finding one’s way through a story intuitively, by going from one place to another and talking to people and turning left instead of right at some key moment. It’s the hypnotic visual devices that put the seal on the dreamlike quality of the enterprise. “Alphaville” flickers and rolls through your mind like a memory of driving around at night.

Watch Alphaville For Free On Gomovies.