ALPHAVILLE (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I'll be brief: while I think I understand most of the reason that critics esteem Jean-Luc Godard's ALPHAVILLE, the film simply never adds up to much in my book. My diffidence may stem from a sense that the dialogue, both spoken and in the internal meditations of the star, is too improvisational to add up to much of anything.

The idea of a futuristic society which has stamped out all human spontaneity dates back at the very least to E.M. Forster's 1909 "The Machine Stops." Godard's early working title for the project, "Tarzan vs. IBM," communicates a conflict between a primitive, vital mode of human existence and an artificial pseudo-life, in which the human desire for security engenders a sort of living death.

Naturally Tarzan's name is not conjured with in the French original (though I saw an English-dubbed version in which some character claims that heroes like "The Phantom" and "Flash Gordon" have vanished because of the new technocracy). Whatever Godard thought about contemporary pop-culture heroes, in the final version of ALPHAVILLE he contents himself with evoking the film-persona of Lemmy Caution. This character, originally a prose-fiction detective, had become celebrated for eight earlier French-language films starring actor Eddie Constantine. As incarnated by Constantine, Caution embodied the American icon of the "hard-boiled dick" a la Sam Spade, though the Caution films were certainly filtered through a French sensibility. Godard had already made a somewhat sardonic comment on the French "Cult of Humphrey Bogart" in 1960's BREATHLESS. But in this film, Lemmy Caution is Godard's noble savage, striking back against the Society of the Machine-- which, as Caution points out, is not so much "Alphaville" as "Zeroville."

This Caution has no continuity with the 20th-century detective; in some far-future when humanity has colonized other planets, he's a secret agent assigned to infiltrate Alphaville in order to destroy it. The city, its people and all its devices look just like contemporary Paris, where the film was shot: Godard's only concessions to the imagery of SF-cinema are a few scenes in computer-rooms. During the hero's reconnoitering, he's aided by a female agent (Anna Karina), also the daughter of the genius who created Alphaville's domineering computer-system. The two fall in love, and the genesis of their human feeling, more than any violent action by Caution, leads to the computer's demise.

The supposedly profound lines of ALPHAVILLE are a mixed bag at best, suggestive of things people may say when having psychedelic visions. Godard throws in a few concessions to the "thriller" elements of detective fiction-- Caution shoots a few people, beats up some antagonists, and drives a car real fast-- but the director shoots these diffidently, as if seeking to undercut the violence, much as Robert Aldrich did with his adaptation of Mike Hammer in 1955's KISS ME DEADLY. Thus, despite these elements, ALPHAVILLE does not rate as a combative film, even within its proper category of an irony.

It may be that the Lemmy Caution films had already played out their popularity by the time ALPHAVILLE showed up in French theaters. But for whatever reasons, the Caution series did not continue, even though Godard's film was unquestionably outside their continuity. The cinematic Caution did not re-appear again except in a 1989 telefilm and a 1991 movie in which Constantine was once more directed by Godard, though this movie was not a sequel to the 1965 collaboration.