Alphaville (1965) (French: Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, and Howard Vernon.
It’s probably not true, but the story goes like this: Sometime in the 1930s, a down-on-his-luck London writer (who was sometimes a reporter, a private investigator, or a police constable) claimed that anybody could write a crime thriller in the American literary style. A skeptical friend bet £5 that he couldn’t do it, but the writer set out to prove him wrong. That’s how author Peter Cheyney wrote This Man Is Dangerous, the first in a series of several books and stories featuring the American FBI agent Lemmy Caution.
Whether or not Cheyney mimicked the style made famous by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler well enough to earn that £5, his books were incredibly successful. They are classic pulpy crime fiction in every way: gruff men with very loose codes of ethics, beautiful women in abundance, thugs always ready to offer a beatdown, everything soaked in whiskey and smelling of cigarettes. After World War II, when everything American in style was enjoying a period of esteem in France, Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution books were adapted into a series of movies released between 1953 and 1962, all starring American actor Eddie Constantine in the lead role.
I don’t know about you, but upon learning this I had an immediate and obvious question: How the heck does that lead to Alphaville? To a film with the same actor playing the same lead character, not based on any Cheyney novel but instead presenting a grim science fictional scenario about a supercomputer that has subjugated an entire city under totalitarian rule, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, one of the most revered filmmakers of all time and a pioneer of an iconoclastic, experimental film style that sought to deliberately transform movies into high art?
It’s a good question that has an interesting and layered answer, which we’ll get to in a moment. First let’s talk about French New Wave cinema. (You may insert your own joke about how many college dates begin with those exact words.)
French New Wave cinema, much like last week’s German Expressionism, was a deliberate artistic response to the world around it. Specifically, in this case, the political, social, and financial instability of France in the aftermath of World War II, during which lot of French films tended toward the old-fashioned and nostalgic. That did include the aforementioned film adaptations of pulp novels about American tough guys, but it also included more high-brow fare such as period films and adaptations of classic literature.
At the same time, many French film critics were growing dissatisfied with how staid it all felt; they were particularly tired of how films played it safe by never trying to be more than visual versions of familiar stories. They wanted film to try something new. In 1948, Alexandre Astruc published an essay called “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo,” in which he wrote, “…cinema will gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.” A few years later in 1954, François Truffaut (then a notoriously scathing critic, not yet a filmmaker himself) expanded on these same ideas in a piece innocently titled “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in which he basically went scorched-earth on the entire French film industry, deriding its output as insipid, formulaic, and even embarrassed to be films rather than novels.
These manifesto-like pieces exemplify the frustration that drove the New Wave filmmakers. They believed, and set out to prove, that film as an artform can and should do more than tell the same kind of stories in the exact same ways over and over again. Their approach was generally low in budget but high in existential philosophy, with a fondness for improvised dialogue and a disregard for the accepted rules of cinematic direction. In the long run, all of this also contributed to the idea of film directors as auteurs, that is, as the “authors” most profoundly responsible for a movie’s artistic style and focus—an idea so ingrained in how we view film directors today that it requires a bit of a mental adjustment to consider a time when it had to be defined.
Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) was the first real success of the French New Wave, followed very shortly by Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), his first feature-length film. Those two movies together convinced filmmakers and critics around the world to pay attention. Godard’s fame, in particular, was instantaneous, and even at the time people were talking about how its unique style was going to change movies forever.
And it did! They were completely right about that. Godard is universally regarded—especially by other filmmakers, but also by critics, scholars, historians, film buffs, everybody—as one of the most influential directors of all time.
In the early ’60s, that legacy was all in the future. Godard was an exciting young filmmaker making a whole lot of movies in a storm of productivity. And there was one particular kind of movie he wanted to make: He wanted to put a detective on a spaceship.
He really, really wanted to put a detective on a spaceship.
Godard specifically referenced Brian Aldiss’ 1958 generation ship novel Non-Stop and the works of A.E. von Vogt as inspiration for making a sci fi movie. He was also an admirer of American crime and detective films, so much so that at some point he apparently lived in a Paris apartment decorated with nothing but a poster of Humphrey Bogart. And what he wanted to do was put a noir story in a science fiction setting.
I love this because it’s the most relatable moment of inspiration I’ve read in all my research for this film club series. I have never before in my life suspected I could have anything in common with Jean-Luc Godard, but I understand this desire completely. After all, who wouldn’t want to send a noir detective to space? I always want to send noir detectives into space. I wish more sci fi writers shared this desire.
Alas, Godard was a relatively new director making low-budget films. His success and renown were growing, but he didn’t have access to the kind of money needed for spaceship special effects. (This was also a few years before Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, after which it became a lot more common for people to accept the possibility that artsy film style + spaceship sci fi = success.) (Also, yes, we are going to watch 2001 at some point for this film club, and not just reference it in every other article. I just haven’t decided when.)
So Godard had to change his plan. Lucky for him, he had also become interested in the way computers were being used in both commerce and government, so that’s where he focused. He even thought about calling his film IBM vs Tarzan which, let’s face it, would have been awesome, but maybe not for the reasons he was considering at the time.
We’re almost to the answer to the question of how Alphaville came about, but there’s one more necessary component: In 1958, French anthropologist Jean Rouch presented a film called Moi, un noir, a fictional ethnography of a group of Nigerian immigrants to Ivory Coast. During the day, the characters struggle with the challenges of ordinary life, but during the night they escape into elaborate fantasies in which they cast themselves as actors and characters from movies, including Tarzan, Edward G. Robinson, and Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution.
Godard loved Moi, un noir so much that he wrote about it at least twice and spoke about how fascinated he was by the idea of one story co-opting and interpreting a character from another story. (Because it must be said: Yes. That’s fanfiction. That’s transformative art. Others have made this observation.) And when he had the chance to work with Eddie Constantine, who he met via producer André Michelin, he was able to invent his own version of Lemmy Caution.
So that’s the answer to the question of how this very odd movie came into existence from a lot of disparate pieces. I mean “odd” in a good way; I think Alphaville is great, even with its jarring soundtrack and surrealist pretensions and utterly dire female characters. But I can also understand why audiences at the time did not have the same reaction, to put it mildly. Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris reported that he felt “waves of hatred washing up on the screen” at the film’s premiere.
The film begins, as all detective noir films begin, with a voiceover. But it’s not Lemmy Caution’s voice, not yet. The first voiceover we hear is a gravelly, distorted, inhuman voice speaking as we follow Caution along his journey into the city. He has traveled across the galaxy from another planet but arrives by car and checks into a hotel with an old-fashioned glass elevator. He isn’t in his hotel in Alphaville for more than a few minutes before a beautiful woman tries to seduce him, a pair of thugs try to kill him, and he fires his gun several times but nobody seems to notice.
We learn that he’s come to Alphaville under a fake name—posing as a reporter for the newspaper Figaro–Pravda—looking for Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), a famous scientist. Von Braun’s daughter, Natacha (Anna Karina), arrives at the hotel to meet with Caution. We are deep in familiar noir territory here: a mysterious powerful man, his beautiful daughter, even a trench coat that could have come directly from Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. In addition, the entire film is in black and white and filmed at night on very fast film stock. The visual effect is remarkable: the parts of each scene shown in available light stand out, whereas those left in darkness are completely obscured.
Yet amidst these familiar trappings, the film very quickly veers into the weird. We’re across the galaxy in the future, but Caution is a veteran of Guadalcanal. The Bible in the hotel room is a dictionary. Arrows, signs, and the equations E=mc2 and E=hf (the latter being the Planck-Einstein relation fundamental to quantum mechanics) flash randomly across the screen at times. Casual conversation often seems to make no sense; characters say “I’m fine, don’t mention it” in place of greetings and farewells that never occur. When Caution meets up with another secret agent (played by Akim Tamiroff), they reference Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon as colleagues. Caution quotes surrealist poet Paul Éluard.
We learn that Alphaville is under the control of a supercomputer called Alpha 60, which rules the city in a totalitarian dystopia that’s a mashup of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The word “why” is forbidden, as is any art or literature or anything else that might elicit emotion; transactional sex is commonplace but love is verboten; Alpha 60 is constantly removing words from the language to suppress the ideas around them. Lemmy Caution has come to Alphaville not merely to meet Professor von Braun, inventor of Alpha 60, but to kill him.
Alphaville features no special effects, no matte paintings, no science fictional backgrounds or items—in fact, the film specifically goes out of its way to avoid any such scenes or gadgets. Caution has to go to a phone booth to make a call, where he is asked whether he wants a local or galactic connection. The Alpha 60 is represented visually as a light shining through a turning fan, speaking in that distorted voice we hear in the voiceover. The core of the machine, when we finally see it, is a Bull Gamma 60, a real computer that went on sale in 1960.
But that doesn’t mean there is no effort to visualize the future. Godard might not have had the resources to build a cinematic spaceship, but he did have Paris in the 1960s, and the city was building a futuristic setting for him. The French government was trying to modernize the capital in the ’50s and ’60s, which meant constructing a lot of office blocks, apartment complexes, and skyscrapers. The Electricity Board Building, Maison de la Radio, and CNIT (Centre des Nouvelles Industries et Technologies), all of these make an appearance as the Alphaville of the distant future, a selection of looming, modernist buildings, alternately showing a gridwork of lit windows from the outside and sleek glass and curving staircases on the inside. The setting serves to emphasize that the hostile, alienating nature of Alphaville comes not from its futurism, but from the sense of rigid disconnect and isolation imposed on the people.
Caution is told that anybody who can’t adapt to the city goes insane and dies by suicide, but as the audience we can see how the precise opposite must be true: this is a city that will kill anybody who resists conforming. This theme is drawn out to its absurd extreme in the most bizarrely disturbing—and therefore my very favorite—scene in the film. Caution tags along when Natacha goes to witness a public execution of those who have violated the city’s laws. One by one the men step onto a diving board above a swimming pool. It could be any school or community pool, so bland is its appearance. The men shout out their last words—proclamations of emotion, rebellion, desire—before they are shot and drop into the water. A group of women dive into the pool, as elegant as a synchronized swim team, to finish them off in a violent frenzy. All the while, people from the city watch dispassionately from above. Natacha tells Caution that one man’s crime was loving his wife.
It’s brutal. It’s outrageous. And it’s a rare moment when Caution’s tough-guy façade gets a little rattled. This might be a city ruled by a machine that decides every aspect of human lives by replacing emotion with probability, but the gory spectacle of publicly executing people who dare think or say the wrong things is all too human.
In the end it’s poetry that defeats Alpha 60, and it’s love that frees Natacha from its effects as she and Caution flee the city and leave its citizens to an unknown fate. What else could it be? When a science fictional dystopia is created by imagining a world without passion and creativity, the only way to escape that dystopia is to reclaim them. That’s as true now as it was in the 1960s.
There is some debate among critics and scholars about how to categorize Alphaville. Not around whether it’s properly sci fi or properly noir or anything like that, but around the question of whether either of those components constitutes parody or pastiche or some other form of homage or mimicry. I generally find categorization discussions very tedious, and that’s still true here, but I am interested in how assigning any such description to Alphaville involves making assumptions about the tone and intent.
I think more than one thing can be true: Godard was both admiring and mocking the detective noir genre, as he was both embracing and subverting the sci fi. In his version of noir the last hints of glamour are gone, the moody allure ground away. Audiences at the time reacted very negatively to the film, and it completely ended Eddie Constantine’s career as Lemmy Caution—as though the safe, stylized cynicism of traditional noir was fine, but expanding it to this outrageous fictional world in which every cynical belief is not only true but even worse than we expect was a step too far. Likewise, Godard’s version of a sci fi future doesn’t allow any comfortable distance between us and the dystopia, because there aren’t even gadgets or sets to set it apart. It’s just our world, with our history and our office blocks, our hotels and our swimming pools, and it’s barely even pretending to be otherwise.
What this film is doing, I think, is using the language of one genre combined with the themes of another to tell a story about an imagined future. And, like all stories about the future, that means it’s also very much about the present—both the present in which it was made as well as the present in which we view it.
What are your thoughts on Alphaville? What do you think of this particular vision of the future? Did anybody else have a weary “don’t invent the torment nexus” moment when the characters were talking about how artists have no place in a world ruled by computational probability?
Next week: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. It’s time to watch Blade Runner. Find it on the torment nexus of your choice: Amazon, Google, Vudu, Microsoft, YouTube. Please note that the article will go up on Thursday, June 20 instead of the usual Wednesday.
