Alphaville (1965)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Alphaville (1965) – J.-L. Godard

Even approaching Godard’s Alphaville knowing what it is, I find it a difficult film, even a hard slog at times.  There is a lot to unpack. Godard seems to put his films together by combining isolated parts almost haphazardly, counting on the seemingly random juxtaposition of words/ideas and images to create some new meaning in the viewer or to add extra angles to his favourite themes (e.g., horrors of capitalism). Although I always go into this film expecting that Godard’s use of the B-movie serial featuring Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, an American ex-pat who played the role for real in French films of the ‘50s and later showed up in The Long Good Friday) is going to provide a structure around which Godard can improvise and embellish, I forget that his modus operandi is basically to deconstruct so that the structure soon disappears, represented only by discrete scenes that contain elements of what might have been. So, Lemmy Caution, masquerading under the name Ivan Johnson, enters the city/planet/zone of Alphaville from the Outer Lands driving his Ford Galaxy, looking for the scientist ruler von Braun and the agent who went before him Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff). It turns out that Alphaville is ruled by logic, and a dominating computer called Alpha 60, and all forms of creativity, imagination, and even love are forbidden.  Anna Karina, playing von Braun’s daughter, is assigned to look after Johnson/Caution but he quickly decides to turn her to his side, to free her. Of course, I’ve made the plot seem like a plot but it doesn’t play out that way, not really. Instead, Godard gives the characters dense poetic dialogue (apparently there is a long quote from Jorge Luis Borges here) that might take several viewings to decipher.  Even without careful analysis, the effect on the viewer is the same – Brechtian detachment. This time through, the meanings that pierced through my fog focused on poetry’s ability to bring light to darkness, signalling Godard’s interest in the complexity of language and the intellectual capacity of art to add value to existence. But I may have missed the point…or many points. If so, the film can still be enjoyed at the surface level by taking in Raoul Coutard’s splendid cinematography – using the camera to make present-day Paris seem otherworldly and strange in the darkness, highlighting the alienating effects of new architecture. But there are also gorgeous close-ups of each actor looking into the camera (which could be Warhol portraits yet-to-come) – they look and we are again removed from the action. In fact, alienation may be both content and process for Godard in this work – trying to grasp it/everything without being pushed too far away is the challenge.