One of the most influential science fiction films that most people haven’t seen, Jean-Luc Godard’s \u00a01965 “Alphaville” is a combination film noir, social satire and riff on tough-guy movies, set in a world of nonstop night. It’s named after its setting, a technocratic dictatorship. Newly rereleased in a restored version, it’s a disorienting, often unnervingly quiet and patient film that deliberately tries to induce a dream state in its audience, to the point of seeming to hypnotize them with repetitious bass-voiced narration and alternating black screens and closeups of flashing lights. Like a lot of great science fiction movies, it’s more of an experience or vibe than a coherent set of philosophical or political ideas. And it’s more valuable now for how it recorded the anxieties and curiosities of the time when it was made than for the predictions that it got “right” or “wrong” (though it should be said that the film’s\u00a0main storyline, which is about the fear of sentient technology\u00a0taking over ever aspect of human life,\u00a0feels unnervingly current).<\/p>\n
In France, the movie\u00a0was titled “Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy\u00a0Caution,” after its hero (Eddie Constantine), a trench coat-wearing investigator who’s known mainly by his ID number, 003 (sound like any other famous secret\u00a0agent that you know?). Lemmy enters Alphaville from The Colonies in a Ford Galaxie, presenting himself as a journalist named Ivan Johnson who writes for Figaro-Pravda<\/em>.\u00a0He’s actually come to destroy the Alpha 60, a sentient computer that controls life in Alphaville, and find and kill professor Von Braun (named after the rocket scientist), who created the computer. This movie came out three years before “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with its murderous\u00a0HAL-9000. Fear of computers was everywhere in 1960s cinema\u2014it never went away after that, really\u2014and if you bought a ticket to the cinema then, you were likely to encounter a plot line that involved\u00a0wall-sized units with magnetic tape spools and punch cards (even in romantic comedies like “Desk Set”), along with discussions of whether humanity was on the verge of losing its free will and sense of poetry and turning into serfs or worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lemmy represents that disreputable wild-card sense of the human spirit that bubbled up from popular culture through gangster and detective movies and certain hard-edged mid-century Westerns (like the ones that starred James Stewart and\u00a0Glenn Ford, as well as\u00a0Sergio Leone’s “Dollars”\u00a0films, which were made contemporaneous with “Alphaville”). It\u00a0flowered fully in the 1970s, with combative counterculture heroes lashing out against The System, however incoherently. There are some affinities between this movie and the novel and film of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which pitted an outwardly emotionless agent of the oppressive Powers that Be\u00a0against a raging, scruffy, grandiloquent pig hero whose unpredictability and danger symbolized the free will that\u00a0was in danger of being lost. The equations for quantum physics and spatial relativity are regularly flashed onscreen, further putting across the idea that a twisted caricature of “logic” defines Alphaville and is squashing the humanity out of it.<\/p>\n There’s a\u00a0strain of misogyny, as there sometimes is in crime or detective films and what would later be known as counterculture fables.\u00a0This movie has no use for women except as schemers, seducers, and individuals in need of teaching and rescue, although, as is usually the case in Godard’s scripted films, the women look so fabulous and carry themselves with such assurance that they become dynamic life-forces anyway. (A man dies having sex with a “Seductress Third Class.”) Lemmy eventually teams up with\u00a0Natacha von Braun\u2014played by\u00a0Godard’s muse Anna Karina\u2014an Alpha 60 programmer and the\u00a0daughter of Professor von Braun. They fall in love, even though she says she doesn’t understand love or conscience or other concepts, and even though\u00a0poetry, emotion and affection have been banned by the computer overlord of Alphaville. “Star Trek” hound-dog\u00a0James T. Kirk got into this kind of\u00a0predicament, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lemmy’s impulsive, macho, instinctual approach is a threat to the new status quo. His meathead roughness represents the humanity that’s on the verge of being deprogrammed from the species. (The 1940s Hollywood movies were better with this sort of\u00a0stuff, curiously; they let their femme fatales and even their “honey trap” minor characters\u00a0have a bit of psychological depth even when the stories were primarily driven by ambitious, macho\u00a0men.)<\/p>\n Lemmy\u00a0is a film buff’s construct who incarnates the French New Wave critic and filmmaker’s academic, intellectualized interpretation of American genre films twenty years earlier.\u00a0Though Lemmy is\u00a0drawn from a character created by Peter Cheyney, whose stories were set in the modern day,\u00a0Godard and Constantine’s film incarnation vaults Lemmy into the future, but keeps the 1940s tough guy\u00a0affectations and storytelling. The result is\u00a0a sci-fi incarnation\u00a0of Raymond\u00a0Chandler’s gumshoe Philip Marlowe as played by Humphrey Bogart in the black-and-white classic\u00a0“The Big Sleep,” down to the brusque attitude, cutting wisecracks,\u00a0and “I work alone” ethos. But he’s\u00a0much wearier and less glamorous. And he\u00a0captures some essential, true quality of World War II veterans in the 1960s when most veterans were in their forties. (Despite being set in the future, “Alphaville” presents Lemmy as a veteran of the Battle of Guadalcanal.)\u00a0<\/p>\n The ingrained cynicism that the character radiates connects \u00a0“Alphaville” to the sociocultural subtext of\u00a0film noir, a genre that\u00a0expressed some of the malaise that the world felt after being forced to reckon with wholesale\u00a0slaughter in Europe, the Pacific, the camps, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then resume “normal”\u00a0life. The fear that everything and everyone are being mechanized, plasticized, packaged and controlled was a common theme in mid-twentieth century fiction and film, in everything from Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical science fiction novels to movies like ‘The Stepford Wives,” ‘THX-1138″\u00a0and the original “Westworld.” At the same time these developments were happening in culture, the United States military was contracting with the RAND Corporation to apply computer science to foreign policy and warfare. (The corporation is name-checked in another iconic film\u00a0from the ’60s, “Dr. Strangelove,” whose Henry Kissinger-inspired title character \u00a0refers to his association with\u00a0“The BLAND Corporation.”)<\/p>\n Fans of the “Blade Runner”\u00a0movies as well as visionary sci-fi\u00a0fantasies like “Brazil” and “Dark City” will detect seeds of those and other future works in “Alphaville,” particularly in the way that the story is told: 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\u00a0focus on plot, it\u2019s as if\u00a0an obligation is being satisfied.\u00a0(<\/span>Oh, you want plot?\u00a0Fine…Here you go.<\/em>)\u00a0Often the exposition is so perfunctory and elaborate and jargon- and name-filled\u00a0that it sounds like doublespeak or a Marx Bros-style goof, as in the Orson Welles version of Kafka’s “The Trial,” which came out three years before “Alphaville.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the most influential science fiction films that most people haven’t seen, Jean-Luc Godard’s \u00a01965 “Alphaville” is a combination film noir, social satire and riff on tough-guy movies, set in a world of nonstop night. It’s named after its setting, a technocratic dictatorship. Newly rereleased in a restored version, it’s a disorienting, often unnervingly …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[45,47,51],"class_list":["post-1374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction-movies","tag-drama","tag-mystery","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}