Godard Season: Alphaville (Dir Jean-Luc Godard, 1h39m, 1965)

So far in our journey through Godard's narrative films, we have considered Godard as provocateur, the enfant terrible storming the gates of French cinema armed with a camera and a crew, and a new attitude, and the aftermath of his arrival as the great innovator, placing the building blocks of cinema hither and thither as he chooses in a period that shakes up the very foundations and fundamentals of the medium. Today, we are going to view Godard in a more conventional light, as (if we can consider this film lesser), a mere maker of excellent narrative cinema. Today, we are going to Alphaville.

The sole science-fiction film in Godard's filmography, in which a noir protagonist, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine, reprising a role from multiple French B-Movies, and already a star in the country since the 1950s) infiltrates the mysterious technocratic city in search of a scientist and answers to the disappearance of one of his colleagues, and finds unexpected love, and an unfeeling and inhuman adversary in the form of the titular machine is a film at once nostalgic, and stunningly forward looking.

Whilst Godard's work between 1964 and 1965 amounts solely to the aforementioned A Married Woman, it is to Alphaville's star that we must turn our attentions. Eddie Constantine is a figure unfairly overlooked in modern cinema-his collaborators and co-stars range from Edith Piaf to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Lars Von Trier, and his serial appearances as the secret agent cum detective Lemmy Caution (created by English author, Peter Cheyney) across the late 1950s and early 1960s (reprised here in Alphaville), and similar pulp anti-heroes in French B-movies is matched by his curious pop-icon status and appearances in heavyweight arthouse fare. Still a cult figure in France and Germany, where he died in 1993, aged 79, Constantine would have been a familiar figure to Godard and his contemporaries.

What Godard does though, is to take this familiar stock hero, half Phillip Marlowe, half James Bond, and drop him into the middle of the unfamiliar: the future. We join Caution on the edge of Alphaville, as he drives into the heart of the city, on the trail of a missing agent, with a mission; find the agent, find Alphaville's creator (the shadowy Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), and destroy the computer that has come to totally run the lives of the city it is named for, Alpha 60. From the very beginning, Godard makes a perfect replica of the noir-Paul Misraki's score is straight out of the films Caution originally hailed from, full of strident strings, but into it, he places something abstract, alien, the repeated flashing light of...something-a car? A searchlight? The camera pans across graffiti.

Then Alpha 60 itself speaks-its voice, produced by an uncredited man who had undergone throat surgery, his voicebox replaced by a mechanical one-it is a stunningly strange, and innately othered voice, a hint of humanity refracted via mechanism. Even here though, Godard plays with the elements of noir; It may be a ratcheting mechanical voice, it may be our eventual antagonist entering the film before our hero even speaks, but it is also, undeniably, the internal narration of the noir protagonist-Alpha 60 interjects several times throughout the rest of the film to voice its internal thoughts, its control, its scientific viewpoint, its logic. Caution himself narrates at points, this to and fro between the mechanical mind of science fiction, and the flesh and blood detective the fulcrum of the film's two influences in miniature. Alpha 60 is philosophical, but there's more than a hint of the horrifyingly clinical, matter-of-fact HAL 9000, not merely in how matter-of-fact both machines exude a nigh-human temperament, but in their very designs, both dominated by glowing orbs representing a single, unblinking eye.

Here, Godard begins his balancing act, as Caution appears, at the wheel of his Ford Galaxie, smoking a cigarette; arriving at the hotel in which he's staying, under the guise of a journalist, Godard stretches his, and Raoul Coutard's ability, in the nearly four minute tracking shot (including following Constantine up in the hotel's other lift in perfect synchronisation) that takes him from entering the hotel to shooting dead a man sent to kill him, whilst picking up the unwanted attentions of one of Alpha 60/Alphaville's femme fatale-esque Seductress Third Class (Christa Lang); there is, from his very first second on film, to its last, a machismo, a presence to Caution, a figure from the old world, the Outside, as the film puts it, who perfectly typifies the hard-boiled protagonists of noir cinema, in sharp contrast to this bloodless and sanitised world that Alpha 60 rules over.

Yet, from the moment that Caution starts off on the trail of his colleague, we are no longer simply in a noir detective story. The cinematography is certainly noirish, in muted black and whites, our hero is undoubtedly that of the noir, but the world Caution inhabits, the world of Alphaville, is stunningly modern, dominated by the concrete and glass that comes to visually define Alphaville (real-life Paris.) This is, as A Clockwork Orange would do six years later with the brutalist jut of Thamesmead. London, and Solaris seven years later with Akasaka, Tokyo, the ultramodern architectural, standing in for the futuristic. It is a world out of balance with human scale, out of nation. Alphaville is strange, and foreign, and like the machine that oversees the city, deeply impersonal.

It is this conflict, this battle between the deeply human Caution, who, meeting the daughter of Von Braun, Natacha (Anna Karina), immediately falls in love with her as she guides him around the microcosm of Alphaville juxtaposes perfectly with the oppressive and deeply inhuman world they find themselves in. Alpha 60 is a creature of logic, a mechanical thinker, overseeing the increasing mechanisation of life-and indeed, death-one cannot help but read the indoctrination of a populace under the auspices of a machine built by the namesake of one of the most prominent survivors of the Third Reich, nor avoid the horrifying juxtaposition of a populace under that machine tattooed with identity numbers. Yet, Alphaville is not a battle of ideology, but of emotion. Natacha and Caution's love throwing things out of balance, and matters of emotions only further destabilising the utterly emotionless city till an utterly human moment, something the impossibly complex machine cannot comprehend, finally tips the balance.

There is, even without Godard's usual experimentalism-much of the script was allegedly improvised but given the increasing focus on visual rather than narrative storytelling in Alphaville, it rarely feels it-a stunning sense of modernism to Alphaville. It is a film out of time, a futuristic logical world up against the stock figure of the unflappable noir antihero plucked straight out of other narratives. For all the control that Alpha 60 has over people in the city, it simply cannot comprehend this man from outside, and it is this that fatally undoes the machine.

There is something, thus, utterly human in Alphaville, which would influence cinema for decades to come, not just in its production design, but its melding of philosophy and French literature with the low brow action and thrilling heft of a noir. Nowhere better does this arrive in cinema than with the equally influential Blade Runner (Dir Ridley Scott, 1982), a collision of science fiction at its most forward looking, and noir at its most traditional, where Harrison Ford's voice-over and its femme fatale, Rachael, masterfully echo the themes raised in Alphaville, albeit with the twist that the artificial man is the most poetic and human of them all.

Alphaville is an anomaly in Godard filmography-true, the director's films never looked back into the recent past Godard and his colleagues fought to distance themselves from, but Alphaville looks into future with the unblinking starkness, the genre-blending genius, the matter-of-fact juxtaposition of two different genres into something fresh and new that Alphaville represents. It is Godard's film within a genre that would forever be disrupted, be changed, by its meeting with Lemmy Caution.

Rating; Highly Recommended


Next week, Godard Season concludes with his final film of his New Wave career, the nihilistic and post-modern roadtrip that is Week-End

Why not join a band of fellow film fans, and subscribe to my Patreon from just £1/$1.00 (ish) a month? https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond