Jean-Luc Godard's genre movies are intellectual, jokey meditations that use films as a springboard for his free-associative, political ideas. They go beyond being self-referential, spoofy, camp, or any of the 'in' 60s ways of transcending their material, by simply laying wide open the structural underpinnings of films, especially genre films. In A Woman is A Woman, Godard has his actors sing non-songs and dance non-dances to show that, for him, a Musical is a matter of spirit than of performance. It gets pretty weird when the picture jumps between held poses imitating Gene Kelly stills, as if to indicate, 'place boffo dance number here'. Godard uses the same gag when it comes time to stage a 'dynamic fight scene' for Alphaville - we merely cut to the fighters in extreme poses, patiently holding still. Naturally, he loses a majority of the general audience right then and there - Alphaville was a mini-release art film for festivals and the expresso set.

Godard constructs his movies like unrepentant beat poetry - all of his films have ragged intertitles arbitrarily inserting bald political messages, sometimes frustratingly obvious ones. In Alphaville, the screen is constantly being seized by neon signs, drawings, traffic signals, etc. Here they seem to signify the aura of the ever-present Alpha-60 computer, who is represented visually by whirring fans and crude flashing lights, accompanied by telegraph noises. The voice of Alpha-60, as has been pointed out, is a 'dead voice' made by a man with no voicebox, who's learned to croak artificially.

Godard doesn't try to compensate for a lack of traditional production values, but instead flaunts his budget 'weaknesses' by declaring them irrelevant. There're no special effects except for flashing to negative every once in awhile - to perhaps 'express' the malfunctioning of Alpha-60?. Raoul Coutard's handheld photography is actually very smooth, even beautiful. There are a number of well-shot scenes, that contrast with setups as crude as anything in a no-budget exploitation movie. It's the artistic tone of Godard's film that says, 'I'm trying to express myself here, this is jazz. Read between the images - it's not my job to put a perfect phony image in front of your faces at all times.'

Godard's theme is a powerful one, poetry versus the inhuman computer future. A production title considered was Tarzan versus IBM. With the SuperSpy subgenre getting into swing, the timing was perfect to create a patchwork film made of pieces of genre conventions. Expatriate American GI-turned French movie star Eddie Constantine and his Lemmy Caution character were an established tough guy convention, so Godard co-opted them. What we see and what we hear are at constant odds with one another: Caution's trip through intersidereal space in his 'galaxie' is a simply him arriving by freeway in a late-model American Mustang. We see some industrial installations standing in for the main works of Alpha-60, and the interrogation rooms look like ordinary recording booths. The futuristic city of Alphaville is suggested simply by showing the modern structures of 1965 Paris, which Godard implies are already architecturally inhuman. Caution carries a big gun, like any two-fisted hero, but his only gadget is a pitiful instamatic camera, a mass-produced piece of junk with a flashcube on top, that took low-quality photos through a crummy cheap lens.

The poetry is at the center of the story. Books are disappearing, along with individual words in the dictionaries, which are replaced daily as more words and their underlying concepts are eliminated. Natasha Von Braun, beautifully played by Anna Karina, doesn't recognize the word 'tenderness' and has forgotten what it means. It's a poetic conceit (like the whole show) but it has teeth - our culture seems to 'forget' concepts and the words that go with them, and only individuals keep them alive.

The condemned dreamers of Alphaville are murdered in an indoor pool execution chamber, during a ritual that combines Nazi slaughter with an Esther Williams-style aquacade. As each victim dies, they shout out their last words. One of them talks about moving straight toward one's goal, instead of in circles, a theme which echoes throughout Alphaville - the circles are there in the computer's logic, in the circular stairways, everywhere, to entrap the individual. 'Going in circles', is the activity of the inhabitants of this 'Nowheresville' - pointless circles because Alpha-60 has taken the meaning from their lives. In contrast, Lemmy caution beelines his way straight to the things he loves, and straight to confront his enemies.

Two scientists called Heckle and Jeckyll (played by a pair of film critics) labor in a think tank, staring at a pretty girl in a trenchcoat. Another female stands naked, living statue 'working' behind glass near a well-travelled stairway. A vending machine is a nasty joke on the concept of politeness. Lemmy pushes his way past turnkeys and guards, finally cutting loose in action that parodies commercially recognizable scenes of violence. He bursts through a door, lets several thugs have it, and we know he's as potent as any mainstream secret agent man. When he catches up with the monstrous Von Braun, he does his talking via more pulp poetry, and lets his gun finish up. A voiceover epitaph for the tyrant is read over a grim shot of Lemmy lighting a cigarette: "Let this be a lesson to all those who would take the world for their private hobby horse."

At the conclusion, Godard brings in imagery from every kind of source. "La Zone" of Cocteau is revived in the lost, unbalanced way the 'ant' citizens of Alphaville stagger down hallways after their central control self-destructs. Alpha-60 has removed their souls, and now they're without an interior compass, cut off from gravity. Natasha flops around like a rag doll until Lemmy becomes her source of stability. As Alphaville burns and explodes around them (just a voiceover reference) they escape into outer space (the freeway again). The Misraki music becomes transcendant, as Lemmy helps Natasha remember the concept of 'Love'. It's intensely romantic, with the pulpy notion that if he can make her say the word, if she can remember what it means, the concept of Love can return. SuperSpy movies are mostly dumb exploitative spectacles that have resonance because they play with pulp culture ideas, usually ignorantly. Jean-Luc Godard knows the magic that revolves around poetry and pulp, and animates every minute of Alphaville with this kind of liberating imagination.

Criterion's DVD of Alphaville is a very good rendition of the film, as good as the theatrical prints I've seen and far better than the awful dubbed and mangled messes shown on television before. It's flat 1:33, which looks appropriate, although I'm sure my 35mm screenings were wider. The encoding is fine enough to pick out subtle differences in grain and filmstock, and the source film looks to be undamaged.

There are no extras, but Andrew Sarris' short liner notes effortlessly sum up the charm and significance of the film. The artsy cover art does the show no favors in the marketing sector, but anyone after Alphaville would track it down in a brown wrapper - travelling in a straight line, of course.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
Alphaville rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none
Packaging: Amaray case
Reviewed: July 6, 2002