Alphaville: Love and Poetry

Godard’s Alphaville is a concoction of love and technology, poetry and science.

In a city that is governed by an evil scientist, those who experience love, or grief, or even read poetry are sentenced to death. A tragic scene suffused with endless murder and beautiful synchronized swimmers, is displayed very matter-of-factly. The insouciance attitude in the characters is genuine to Alphaville on account of the inhuman sensitivity that everyone in this city is to attain. This scene specifically demonstrates the interrelation between evil and poetry that is prominent throughout the film.

Alphaville, the city where love is obsolete, technology plays the leading role. Ironically Alphaville is fluid with romanticism and despair that is easily interpreted by the over-sexualized women in this city. And it isn’t hard to predict that it is through the pursuit of love that Alphaville’s regime is eradicated.

Anna Karina, who plays the evil scientists’ daughter, maneuvers her way into the heart of an “outsider”, a journalist who has come to save its citizens from the Alpha 60 dictatorship. Here, with a touch of passion and courage, the journalist who also claims to stand for justice, hunts and kills the scientist while consequentially destroying Alphaville itself.

In a city that is entranced with apathy and dispassion, the film is flooded with love and poetry. From the opening quote by Borges: “Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world”, to Anna Karina reading a love poem from Éluard’s Capital of Pain, Godard weaves love and poetry in and out in this hollow-robotic city.  For the protagonist, poetry turns darkness into light, and in the end, only those who love survive.


-ar

I've traveled 9,000 Kilometers to Give Tenderness to You

"Allow me to say, at the risk of appearing ridiculous, that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." -Che Guevara


Morrey mentions Godard's usage of this quote in Le Gai Savoir, but what better film to exemplify that quote than Alphaville: A Strange Case of Lemmy Caution. We first watch Lemmy Caution (AKA Ivan Johnson) passby a sign when entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxy:

Alphaville

Silence. Logic.

Security. Prudence.

Alphaville is a place where words such as redbreast, weeping, autumn light and tenderness do not exist. Controlled by the computer Alpha 60, Alphaville's creator Professor von Braun (who with his glasses resembles Godard) bans anything that is not logical.  It is also a place where people who behave "illogically" are executed. What's illogical?: the word why; poetry; love; light. 

"Got a light?" asked Natasha "Yes, I've traveled 9,000 kilometeres to give it to you" replied Lemmy. That's how our main characters meet. That's how Natasha is guided towards the light, towards poetry and towards love which therefore leads to her freedom.

Natasha reads a book of poems, Capital of Sorrow by Paul Éluard which was given to Lemmy by a fellow secret agent (whose last words were: "...Alpha 60...make self destruct...Tenderness...Save those who weep.")   Reminiscing to the exact last words said by an illogical at his execution, Nastasha reads from this book "We must advance to live. Aim straight ahead toward those you love. I went toward you, endlessly towards the light."


Throughout the film we watch Nastasha slowly misbehaving: she weeps when Lemmy gets roughed up by Professor van Braun's security, she smiles when she looks at Lemmy, and she learns (herself) how to say "Je vous amie" to the man she loves, Lemmy Caution.

Light=Poetry=Love=Freedom

arv

Surrealism and the Secret Life of Objects

Godard's Alphaville has been described as a genre-bending blend of science fiction and film noir that also culls from pop art, surrealism and German Expressionism. Personally speaking, I perceived the film to be a treatise against the tyranny of rationality, logic and an ultimate call to poetry, and love. But while Godard has been lauded by many for taking on issues that were topical with an almost journalistic zeal, Alphaville has also come in for its fair share of criticism.

One of the sentiments echoed by critics like Pierre Samson is that Godard's vision of a dystopian society is cliched, and that his vision of technological dominance, an all-seeing computer/electronic voice and surveillance heavy city-state was enormously derivative even in the 1960s.  Samson in a scathing critique says, "Godard only chooses the most exterior details, he contents himself with naming things at the expense of knowing how to show them [...] he inhabits the level of a sort of exoticism of automation and modernism". Critics also found the film to be mainfestly reactionary. Godard's championing of humanizing values, and liberty, according to Samson reveals the "Constant temptation to fall back on petit-bourgeois individualism in the face of the fear of the unknown [...] Alphaville is one of the most demoralizing films around. It would like to show us the impossibility of any revolt, the decline of mankind in a controlled economy and the uselessness of all political systems"

However, another way to view the film would be to analyze Godard's choice of locating Alphaville in his present- in Paris in 1965. By choosing to build no elaborate sets, using light creatively and eschewing the  use of special effects, not only does Alphaville escape the fate of most 'futuristic themed films' by managing to look contemporary and relatable even to this day, it also manages to make a philosophical comment on the 'hyper-reality' of our times. In effect, by casting the reality of Paris as a fantasy city, Godard is critiquing a future that has already come to pass.

While an author like Barthes chooses to analyze facets of 'everyday' modern life, like, advertising, celebrity culture, and automobile design to expose the capacity of these structures to create mythologies/deceptions on a mass scale, Godard may also be seen as using  familiar sights of glass and steel buildings, ordinary looking corridors, foyers and architectural elements to make an ironic comment about the nature of our present. As one

of my readings online suggested, in his essay "Simulacra and Science Fiction," Jean Baudrillard says that a postmodern science fiction would put "Models of simulation in place and [...] contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life (1994, p 124)." In an ultimate irony, which is likely to please Baudrillard, an essay by Chris Darke, <http://www.visionsofthecity.com/alphaville.htm> finds that an actual gated community by the name of Alphaville actually exists in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where its residents watch the hired help going through security checks on "Alphaville TV" and fly in and out by helicopter to the world outside its walls.

Alphaville can therefore be seen as a hallucination of the real. Moreover, in an excerpt of Alphaville the book – again by Chris Darke – the scholar offers an interesting observation about the surrealistic element in the film; Darke quotes American scholar, James Naremore who draws a parallel between the works of surrealist poet Louis Aragon who said of American crime films that "Speak of daily life and manage to raise to a dramatic level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime..." In Darke's analysis, Alphaville also reveals the secret life of things, "By featuring a convertible that is an interplanetary craft, a volume of poetry that doubles as a codebook, a cigarette lights that is a Promethean torch, not to mention the $3 Phillips fan, lit from beneath that often represents Alpha 60 when the computer speaks." By doing so, Darke maintains that Godard rediscovers the crux of surrealism – the contamination of reality by the imaginary.

In the final analysis, if one were to go by Godard's own vision of the film, he says, "I didn’t imagine society in twenty years from now, as [H.G.] Wells did. On the contrary, I’m telling the story of a man from twenty years ago who discovers the world today and can’t believe it." And through use of sound, and the camera work by Raoul Coutard, Godard creates a feeling of alienation even as viewers walk through familiar terrains of office corridors, or find themselves in anonymous but recognizable hotel rooms. Science fiction then becomes as real as an office block, or as 'fantastical' as a drive through a deserted roadway.

The American Influence on Character Construction and Cesare Zavattini

In Breathless, we saw Humphrey Bogart in Jean Paul Belmondo’s Michel Poiccard. Then last week in Alphaville, we saw Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution revisit some of Bogart’s characteristics, particularly regarding smoking.

This got me thinking about the American influence on characters in Godard’s films, a topic that I have been wondering about since our Cesare Zavattini readings. (I will come back to Zavattini soon.) While watching Alphaville, I recognized the first man Lemmy Caution must find. His real name is Akim Tamiroff and he was a character actor in a number of American films including two Preston Sturges films, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and Ocean’s Eleven with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. (In the second photo, Tamiroff is the 5^th head from the left, next to Peter Lawford.)

As we know, Sinatra had been Godard’s original choice for Paul Javal in Contempt. Michel Piccoli, the man who ended up playing Paul Javal, references Dean Martin in Some Came Running, a film starring Sinatra.  (Paul is referring to wearing his hat in the bathtub and Martin’s character never took his hat off, even in the bathroom. To see the clip of Dean Martin in Some Came Running, in the bathroom with his hat on go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDaVg_JZrbg&feature=related at about the 6:30 mark—it’s in German here though!)

In the photo above, Brigitte Bardot’s Camille is wearing a black wig similar to the hairstyle of Anna Karina in Vivre sa Vie. Karina’s Nana is quite similar in her overall look to Louise Brooks, the silent movie actress. (And while it is true that Brooks worked with GW Pabst in German films, she remained a contract player at Paramount where she originated her look.)

 

  

Keeping these American influences in mind, I return to Zavattini who said in his A Thesis on Neo-Realism “whereas we are attracted by the truth, by the reality which touches us and which we want to know and understand directly and thoroughly, the Americans continue to satisfy themselves with a sweetened version of truth produced through transposition.” (Zavattini, 69) This condemnation brings up a series of questions:

Would it be accurate to describe Godard’s relationship to the American cinema as a secondary relationship, a step removed from any primary responsibility since he is not American and does not make films in America?

If we can say that his is a secondary relationship, is it that removal which allows his characters to be inspired yet their American influences to be lacking, if we agree with Zavattini?

Is American film redeemable to someone like Zavattini through Godard’s films?

Is there a way in which the American aversion to truth is helpful with regards to Godard’s filmmaking?

If American filmmaking is “undergoing a crisis” (Zavattini 69) yet adding to the films of Godard, how can we reconcile the state of American films? Does this reflect in any way poorly on Godard to someone like Zavattini?

If American films are integral to non-American films, how can we understand Zavattini’s observations which suggest a concrete separation of international cinema?

Sienna

Darkness and Light, Circles, Lines and Signs in Alphaville

 

The first image in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville/The Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution (1965) is a close-up of a varying-in-tempo flickering circular strobe light surrounded in darkness. The varied tempo is important because a constant one would reinforce an eternal present, which is the goal of the computer Alpha60 who despotically rules the residents of Alphaville, divorcing them from past, future, memory, and the humanity these states describe. A varied tempo implies change, unpredictability, and chance, the human attributes Alpha60 works to eradicate. Being obsessed with circles, I was drawn in by this first circle in a film of circles and lines, and followed them through Alphaville. 

Throughout, the circle is associated with Alpha60 while the causal line of past and future is associated with humanity. I concur with Harun Farocki who notes, in Speaking about Godard, the association of the circle with Alphaville is surprising given the mythic signification of the circle as opposed to the causal, scientific connotation of the line. In this film, such a reading is complicated. The circle is imprisonment, the rush forward, freedom. And yet, we see a series of neon arrows that point in a direction, but nowhere in particular, calling the literal linear sign also into question. And despite what the computer says, there is no pure logic or reason without the “ornament of myth” connoted by the circle, as Kaja Silverman notes. This realization will of course be Alpaha60’s undoing. Alpha60 says that “time is like a circle, which spins endlessly … isolated words can be understood, but the whole meaning escapes.” This is because the whole and the linear work in constant relation to each other. 

For me, the tension between circle and line in Alphaville is united in the image of the spiral: which represents simultaneous timelessness and progression – you go around and around and yet never in the same place. Recall: the repeated shots of spiral staircases ascended and descended by Lemmy Caution and Natasha. They are within the spiral of time and yet moving towards a new turn.

From the outset of the film, the image of the circle (the whole) is associated with darkness and light, which create the totality of our lived experience. Even our vision, which we conceive of as whole, is made of alternating light and darkness, fragmented by our involuntary blinking (as film editor Walter Murch points out in In the Blink of an Eye). And yet, we perceive a seamless reality, the spaces in vision filled by our perception, or, as Alphaville posits, our consciousness.

This is our experience of the world and also the experience of cinema: fragments joined by human mind, the visual jump or seemingly seamless cut united in understanding by our active participation, a creative production of imagination. Alphaville is the Text, or “open work,” of which Barthes and Eco write, not the closed circuit of the “Bible” of Alphaville, a diminishing dictionary, but a field of human possibility, represented in the film by poetry. A space for meaning leads to leaps, sparks of illumination. 

The spark is also the spark of humanity, struggling for the freedom to exist under a regime of pure logic and reason (which does not exist). Points of light in darkness are love, affect, poetry and humanity,  suggested by points of light we see throughout the film: Lemmy’s lighter creating the circle of light the first time we see him in his car as he drives into Alphaville; the lightbulb swinging in the dark stairwell above the heads of Henry Dickson and Lemmy Caution (two who can yet pronounce the word “love”); Lemmy’s same lighter which illuminates Natasha, foreshadowing her own reclamation of humanity. As Silverman notes, “there is no positive without negative … no starts without the night, no trembling of desire without the certain knowledge of death.” This is what we understand through Alphaville’s solarized images of negative film cut together with the positive: they work together. The whole and the fragment are co-present; the darkness and the light make each other. What else is cinema, but the shared yet individual experience of light in darkness?

Like the circle that radiates outward, and the unending Mobius strip of the spiral, each flickering image of this film leads to exploration of another one of its aspects or techniques: it becomes impossible to discuss one aspect without leaping to another related aspect. But here I close, only to open out at the same time. 

-- Ruchi Mital