Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution
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- For other uses, see Alphaville.
Plot details
The plot is simple - Lemmy Caution (played by Constantine), an 'outland' agent, arrives in the futuristic city of Alphaville to search for missing agent Henry Dickson. The city is under the control of Professor von Braun and run by the Alpha 60 computer system. Love, poetry, emotion and so on are outlawed for the inhabitants of the city creating an inhuman and alienated society. Caution enlists Natascha (Anna Karina), the daughter of von Braun, to help him.
Godard uses this straightforward SF scenario to produce a bizarre, messy film deliberately unbalanced in its action. The film is dark in terms of physical lighting as well as in its use of elliptical philosophical dialogue and cynical humour.
The First Scene
Nearly flawless camerawork and editing leads to Lemmy Caution driving a car on a freeway and into the city that he is under orders to visit. The freeways are new, long, and curving, including tunnels and bypasses made of concrete, such that this could have been shot in any major city in the world of the 1960s, but the traffic is light or nearly nonexistent. The camerawork is so flawless that there appear to be no cuts or splices for 8 to 10 minutes of screentime, even as he finds himself at the hotel he is checking into, right up to the room he checks into, where he finds an assassin that must be dealt with.
Secretly penetrating a totalitarian dictatorship
Alphaville is a totalitarian futuristic society controlled by a powerful computer that decides everything out of logic. We are told that there is no commander and that orders are merely what "emanates from logic". People should not ask "why", but only say "because", trusting in the implicitly logical conclusions of the computer. People who show signs of emotion (weeping at the death of a wife, or a smile on the face) are presumed to be acting illogically, and are gathered up, interrogated, and marched off a diving board in a swimming pool where they are shot with a submachine gun and then finished off by knife-wielding women in bathing suits. Caution is told that men are executed at a ratio of fifty to every one woman executed. We are told that Swedes, Germans and Americans assimilate well. Images of the famous E=mc² equation is displayed several times throughout the film as a sort of symbol of the regime of logical science that rules Alphaville. At one point, Caution passes through a place called the Grand Omega Minus, from where brainwashed people are sent out to the other "galaxies" to start strikes, revolutions, family rows and studen revolts.
Caution is a parody of an American private eye: wearing a trench-coat and photographing people carelessly he is defiantly erratic in the logical city, dominated by the Alpha 60 computer which he has sworn to destroy. Caution's love for Natascha introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city that the computer has crafted in its own image.
The film was shot in 1960s Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming Alphaville with modernist glass and concrete being used for interiors, reflecting the problems of the future onto contemporary France. There are no special effects to enhance the science fiction elements of the film. Originally, Godard apparently wanted to title the film Tarzan versus IBM.#redirect
The film also features its version of George Orwell's Newspeak. In each room there is a "Bible" which is actually a dictionary that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned .
Characters
Lemmy Caution
The Lemmy Caution character is borrowed from the hard-boiled novels of British author Peter Cheyney, and Eddie Constantine had in fact played the role of Lemmy Caution in earlier French films based on those novels.
As a journalist he calls himself Ivan Johnson, claiming to work for Figaro Pravda and always wears a huge tan overcoat where he keeps various items. He carries a camera with him always and photographs everything he sees, particularly the things that would be ordinarily unimportant to a journalist. As a spy he kills many people particularly in bizarre circumstances, and the fights/shots themselves are displayed in such an unusual way that the intended purpose is surely not clarity. He falls in love with Natasha Von Braun, and kills Alpha 60 and Professor Von Braun at the end of the film. The opposition of his role to logic (and that of other dissidents to the regime) is symbolized by quotations to Éluard.
Natascha Von Braun
She is the daughter of Professor Von Braun, although she says herself "I have never met him". She is a citizen of Alphaville, and when questioned says she does not know the meaning of "love" or "conscience". She works as a programmer for Alpha 60. She discovers, with the help of Lemmy Caution, that she was actually born outside of Alphaville, and the film ends with her touching phrase "Je vous aime" ("I love you").
Alpha 60
Alpha 60 is a huge super-computer created by Von Braun, with supposedly large intelligence capabilities. It converses with Lemmy Caution several times throughout the film, and its voice is seemingly ever present, serving as a sort of bizarre narrator. Caution "kills" or confounds it by telling it a riddle that involves something Alpha 60 can not comprehend: poetry. The scene appears to have inspired similar scenes in episodes of Star Trek ("I, Mudd", "The Ultimate Computer"), The Prisoner ("The General") and the movie Rollerball. However, the creation of the "character" of Alpha 60 is not based on logic alone and is not without knowledge of poetry. In fact, many of its lines are actually quotes from the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. The opening line of the movie, as others, is an extract of his essay "Forms of a Legend". Other references throughout the movie are made by Alpha 60 to the essay "A New Refutation of Time" by the same author.
Prof. Vonbraun
The Professor was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu (a tribute to F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu), however, Caution is repeatedly told that Nosferatu no longer exists. The Professor himself talks infrequently, referring only vaguely to how he hates journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville, even going so far as offering him his own "Galaxy". When he refuses Caution's enticement to go back to the 'outlands', Caution kills him with a pistol shot.
The character of the Professor is probably modeled on Wernher von Braun#redirect , at the time a figurehead for irresponsible science. Or, more probably, on John von Neumann#redirect who invented a lot of computer principles and used a huge computer ENIAC on development of Hydrogen bomb. During World War II he was a member of the A-bomb team and continued in research even after Hiroshima.
Influence
The most notable legacy of Alphaville has been on computers in film. Once described as a 'chain smoking Hal', Alpha 60 may well be an 'ancestor' of HAL 9000 in the film version of , with Alpha's fanned 'eye' translating into Hal's unblinking red 'eye'.
Aside from (1970), where a network of distributed computer systems becomes sufficiently coordinated that they elect to take over the world, the 1977 film, Demon Seed delivers the same kind of tyranny closer to home, where a megacomputer attempts to take over a house and ultimately the world. In both instances, Alphaville appears to have been highly influential. If the story lines were not enough, consider how Proteus IV's croaky voice (played by Robert Vaughn) is similar to Alpha 60's.
Episode 3 of features an enthusiastic fan of Alphaville, and also several direct quotes from the film.
See also
- Jean-Luc Godard
- Cinema of France
- List of French language films
- Rollerball (1975 film)
- Equilibrium (2002 film)
External links
- [The Criterion Collection]
- [The City of Pain - Alphaville]
- [Essay on Epistemology in Alphaville]
- [Andrew Sarris essay at criterionco.com]
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