don’t ask why
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean-Luc
Godard (writer and director) Alphaville:
Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville:
A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) / 1965
It
has always seemed a bit strange to me that director Jean-Luc Godard chose
perhaps the romantic city in the world in which to shoot his vision of a cold
high-rise world devoid of street-life. Even if it makes sense financially, it
is almost unthinkable that in the year I first began coming to that busy-night,
gloriously lit city, 1965, that Alphaville could have anything to do with
Paris! Yes, I had seen, years later, the office high rises of La Défense hovering in the distance, but
it was never a part of the city, on my numerous trips to Paris, which I had any
reason to visit. The Paris I know always has seen as busily bubbling with
citizens and lovers as it is in Gershwin’s An
American in Paris. It is practically a miracle, accordingly, that Godard
was able to film his work on location, a film-noir-like futurist dystopia in
which its creator Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon) and his computer Alpha 60
has taken over the minds of its people, destroying all individualist concepts
of love, poetry, and emotion while replacing them with opposite concepts or
simply eliminating them, much like those people who reveal signs of emotion—even
crying over the death of someone—are eliminated en masse. Swedes, Germans, and Americans, we are told, best
assimilate to Alphaville. The Southern Europeans, we can deduce, are just too
emotional.
Love has been replaced by casual sexual encounters with “seductresses,” who drop their dresses at the slightest provocation, giving visitors sexual release without any of enjoyment of true pleasure of love. Using a kind of stock tough-guy character from a series of Lemmy Caution novels and films (mostly performed by Eddie Constantine, the central actor here), Godard makes no attempt to continue the character type, as he transforms the secret agent into a journalist for the Figara-Pravda, sent to search for missing agent Henry Dickson and to bring von Braun into the outlands while simultaneously destroying the gigantic computer that has reeked such havoc.
Evidently the citizens of Alphaville, in
their sensually-deprived lives (their dictionaries are replaced regularly with
fewer and fewer words) have also become inordinately stupid, as Caution is
anything but “cautious,” stumbling around the darkly-lit city snapping
inexplicable photographs with his cheap Instamatic camera (I had brought one
just that year), asking straight-out questions, and demanding to meet von
Braun—in all of this reminding one of an American tourist trying to take in an
incomprehensible new country.
Meanwhile, Caution conspicuously hangs
around, mostly because he’s fallen in love with Natacha, and gradually attempts
to teach her, through Paul Eluard’s poetry Capital
of Pain, concepts that she does not comprehend. When he finally shoots up
computer headquarters, destroying the computer itself (whose voice, performed
by an actor who had lost his vocal box, dominates the last half of the film)
through a poetic riddle, reminding one, in part, of a story by Jorge Luis
Borges, the film suddenly comes alive. Indeed much of the eerie quality of this
film bears the influence of Cocteau’s Orpheus,
where evil-minded figures also speak in strange poetic gibberish, before art
temporarily saves Eurydice.
The citizens of Alphaville, without their leader and big-brother thinker, suddenly reel and spin through the halls as if their very bodies had also been controlled by Alpha 60, while Caution scoops up Natacha to escape back into the outlands, she, just in time, learning how to speak a completely new concept: “Je vous aime.” Like any good secret agent movie, love wins the day!
If this all sounds a bit silly, I
wouldn’t argue. But Godard is never that simple, and his perfectly dressed
characters, Natacha in a fur-lined dress-coat and Caution in predictable
trenchcoat—often standing against a backdrop of florescent Einstein
formulas—are memorable, speaking, at times, for far more than this work’s
characters and plot.
And Godard’s ending, where poetry wins
out over science, is something that could happen only in France. Kubrick’s 2001
computer, HAL, of only three years later, you’ll recall, almost succeeded in
destroying the spacemen supposedly controlling him, and it was only rational
science that allowed Dave Bowman to survive—if he did survive! Caution and his
new girl-friend, fortunately, are not forced to enter a Louis Quatorze bedroom
in order to die!
Los Angeles,
March 28, 2014
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