Alphaville (film)

For other uses, see Alphaville

Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution is a 99-minute 1965 science fiction film (dystopia) directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. Several scenes incorporate concepts from La Capitale de la Douleur (The Capital of Pain), a book of poems by Paul Éluard.

Plot details

Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine in Alphaville (1965).

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.

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 into the implicitly logical conclusions of the computer. People who act illogicaly are executed (in a swimming pool). We are told that Swedes, Germans and Americans assimilate well.

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. Additionally, Godard apparently wanted to title the film Tarzan versus IBM.

The film also features its version of George Orwell's Newspeak. In addition, it is interesting to note that while the English subtitles refer to 'outlands', the French phrase is 'pays exterieur' which translates to 'outer countries'.

Characters

Lemmy Caution

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.

Natasha 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, with supposedly large intelligence capabilities (although keeping in mind that this is a film set in the future (around the year 2000), it might very well be equivalent to a Pentium IV). This aside, he is an interesting character. A machine created by Von Braun, he converses with Lemmy Caution several times throughout the film, and his voice is seemingly ever present, serving as a sort of bizarre narrator. Caution "kills" him by telling him a riddle that involves something Alpha 60 can not comprehend: poetry.

Prof. Von Braun

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 about how he hates journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville even going as 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.

This character is most certainly modeled on Wernher von Braun, at the time a figurehead for irresponsible science.

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 2001, with Alpha's fanned 'eye' translating into Hal's unblinking red 'eye'.

Aside from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), where a network of distributed computer systems becomes sufficiently inspired that it elects 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.

See also

• Jean-Luc Godard
• Cinema of France
• List of French language films
• Equilibrium (2002 film)

External links

• Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution at IMDb
• The Criterion Collection
• The City of Pain - Alphaville