“Godard’s best film”: Alphaville turns 60

Lemmy Caution: “Never forget that Revenger and Reporter begin with the same letter.”

It is seventeen minutes past midnight, Oceanic Time; having driven all night through intersidereal space, secret agent Lemmy Caution – disguised as Ivan Johnson, reporter for Figaro-Pravda – arrives in the suburbs of Alphaville. The road is empty, the night grey; Lemmy is alone, with only a revolver in the glove compartment.

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Thus begins Alphaville, or a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution. Another title Godard wanted to use was ‘Tarzan versus I.B.M.’, and the first time I saw Alphaville it was the pop art aspect of the film that struck me most.

Of course, Godard, like Marker and Resnais, had been intrigued by comic strips for many years before the term pop art existed. Comic strips seem to represent many things for Godard: first, a source book for the contemporary collective subconscious; secondly, a dramatic framework derived from modern myth – in much the same way as Joyce used the Ulysses myth; thirdly, a reaction against the subtleties of the psychological novel; finally the attraction of comic strip narrative with its sudden shifting of scene, its freedom of narration, its economy.

The plot of Alphaville is pure comic strip; Caution (Eddie Constantine) has been sent to Alphaville, city of the future, to bring back or kill Professor von Braun, architect of this capital of computers. Three agents have already failed: Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, and Henri Dickson. Caution eventually succeeds in his mission, even managing to carry off Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), to whom he succeeds in teaching the meaning of love. The Robot has been redeemed.

Just like a Lichtenstein painting (“Oh, Brad, (gulp) it should have been that way”), the dialogue often echoes the balloons: “Let this serve as a warning to all those who try to…” etc. Characterisation, too, has been reduced to a minimum. The musical score, by Paul Misraki, is extremely effective as used by Godard, but in itself it is (intentionally) the nearest he could get to the Max Steiner of the 1930s. Furthermore, Godard uses all the typographical symbols beloved of pop artists – arrows, buttons, neon lights – all the signposts of modern life.

But Alphaville doesn’t look like a comic strip, and this is where Godard diverges from the true pop artist, who has been defined as “a man who offers a coincidence of style and subject, one who represents mass-produced images and objects in a style which is also based upon the visual vocabulary of mass production.” In other words, the pop artist not only likes the fact of his commonplace objects, but more important, exults in their commonplace look. Godard resembles much more pop fringe figures like Larry Rivers and Rauschenberg who, although fascinated by pop imagery, translate it into a non-pop style.

The second time I saw Alphaville, it was precisely the great refinement and plastic beauty of its style that impressed me. Like the volume of Eluard poems which the dying Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) presses into Lemmy’s hand, Alphaville is the Capital of Pain (Capitale de la Douleur), and the visual style of the film is painful, menacing, anxiety-ridden. Alphaville is Paris. The swimming pool where the intractable citizens are machine-gunned and finished off by knife-wielding girls in bikinis is actually on the outskirts of Paris. The new Electricity Board building is one of the computer centres; the hotel where Lemmy stays looks to me like the Continentale (home of the Gestapo during the Occupation). The problem was to film Paris to make it look like the city of Alpha 60, the city whose inhabitants have become the slaves of electronic probabilities, where tranquillisers come with every hotel room, and logic and the eternal present reign.

On the other hand, there was no real problem, for Paris has always been for Godard the Capital of Pain, and his style has always been anguish-ridden. Without trick shots and special effects, menace is rendered in the usual Godard/Coutard fashion: avoidance of extra lighting creates not an effect of realism, but of a city where the blackness is stronger than the occasional pools of light. Again, because he does not generally use special lighting, he can make play with reflection and shadow in a manner which cannot always be planned in advance, but which always gives the same inevitable effect of mysterious dread. One cannot be sure that individual shots in a Godard film have been planned to create a special dramatic effect, but they always contribute to the mood and general tenor of the film. For example, the glass-enclosed lift in Lemmy’s hotel is the excuse for some fabulously disturbing reflection effects. These are beautiful in themselves, but I don’t think they have any specific relevance at the moment we see them. On the other hand, the ambiguity of the reflections, the fact that we are often unsure of where the camera could have been placed, are of course an effective mirroring of Lemmy’s dépaysement and fears.

As befits a study of a totalitarian state, much of the film takes place in long bureaucratic corridors, labyrinths of power, mazes at whose centre lies death. Here again, Coutard’s flat underlighting and the graininess of the image render the East Berlin effect in all its greyness and desperation. But the palaces of the government, on the other hand, are all sinister elegance, more like New York. In the same way, the northern suburbs are covered in snow and ice, while the southern suburbs are hot and steamy.

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For Alphaville is built visually on extreme contrasts, or so I realised more fully the third time I saw it. Basically there is the contrast of the straight line and the circle. For Godard, the circle represents evil: a man must go straight ahead, says the condemned man on the diving-board. So everything in Alphaville that represents the tyranny of the computers is circular. Lemmy’s hotel suite is built in circular form; the staircases in the government buildings are spiral; even the city itself is, like Paris, circular, and to get from one place to another one must take a circular route. The corridors may be straight, but one always ends up where one started. And of course the computers move in circles. Time, says Alpha 60, is an endless circle. Lemmy, however, maintains that all one has to do is to go straight ahead towards everything one loves, straight ahead: when one arrives at the goal, one realises that one has nevertheless looped the loop (bouclé Ia boucle).

The inhabitants of Alphaville even talk in circles. Whenever anyone says hello, the reply is invariable: “Very well, thank you, please.” “You must never say why; only because,” admonishes Natacha. Death and life are inscribed in the same hopeless circle.

Contrast is also displayed in Godard’s treatment of the sound. The main musical theme is, as I have said, syrupy and romantic, but it never gets beyond the introductory cadence. And it is inter-cut with harsh discordant noises: the slamming of doors, the whirling of the computers, and worst of all, the electronic grating voice of Alpha 60, which is as unpleasant as it is indescribable. It would sound like a death-rattle were it not for the absolute evenness and soulless monotony of its delivery. Godard has always liked to flash brutally from a bright scene to a dark one, but this is carried to extreme proportions in Alphaville, where the greyness of the streets is continually contrasted with the blinding floodlights of the electronic nerve centres. Like so many lasers, they torture the brain, at the same time exercising a hypnotic fascination in their rhythmical flashing.

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In describing a film as extraordinarily individual as Alphaville, it seems somehow an anti-climax to talk about the acting; so suffice it to say that Eddie Constantine is the perfect intergalactic private-eye, and Anna Karina seems to have gone through a second metamorphosis. Just as the difference between her performances in Une Femme est une Femme and Vivre sa Vie was incalculably startling, so she has left behind her earlier incarnation, and now stands before us, no longer the wistful little girl of Bande à Part, but a woman perfectly capable of rendering both the brainwashed and deadly “Seducer, second class” (her job in Alphaville), and also the woman who can just barely remember life before words like redbreast, autumn light, conscience, tears, and tenderness, were eradicated from the Bible/Dictionary owned by every inhabitant of Alphaville, new editions of which are produced daily.

It seems equally anti-climactic to point out that Godard’s sense of humour is well to the fore in Alphaville. Some of it can’t possibly come out in the subtitles, though, so perhaps it should be explained. Caution learns that while the intractable members of society are killed off, the reclaimable ones are sent to H.L.M.’s – Hôpital de la Longue Maladie: Hospitals for Long Illnesses. (H.L.M. actually means Habitations à Loyers Modérés: in other words, council houses.) When the fluorescent lights go on in the corridors of Alphaville, someone remarks, “Ah, dawn is breaking: Le jour se lève.” Then there is the efficient method of subduing criminals: a second-class seductress is ordered to tell one of the official repertory of jokes; when the victim doubles up with laughter, he is hit over the head and taken away.

Most anti-climactic of all would be a summing up, in which I would say that for me Alphaville is not only Godard’s best film, but one of the most important in recent years. But it is.