Netflix Pick: Godard’s Alphaville

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After seeing Godard’s Breathless at the AFI Silver Theatre earlier this summer, I’ve found myself on a bit of Godard kick, loading NetFlix with a bunch of the director’s work.  Up through the queue comes Alphaville, the French master’s 1965 sci-fi noir film.

What’s Godard’s equation for success, here?  How about this:

1984 + Brave New World + Philip Marlowe + Dr. Strangelove = Alphaville

But that equation merely contributes to the plot.  Thanks to the futuristic story set in a contemporary Paris, the viewer is immediately confronted with a sort of cognitive dissonance.  It’s a movie about the future?  But it looks like the now (or 1965 now)? Seemingly random “psychological tests” for the lead (and also the viewer), reversed nonverbal signals for “yes” and “no,” and programmed responses to questions that haven’t been asked creates a world that requires a certain abandoning of our preconceptions. For any viewer who watches the film today, our more modern notions of the sci-fi genre only add to the film’s effect.  (The “galaxies” are other nations, also known as the Outlands in the isolationist Alphaville.)

Alphaville is controlled by a fascist supercomputer called Alpha 60, who uses logical calculations to stabilize the city.  Illogical emotions like love or grief, along with any notion of art or poetry, have been destroyed, sometimes by executing those citizens who cannot be dehumanized.   The word “why” is forbidden.

Our guide through this glassy-eyed world of logic is a rough-edged spy from the Outlands named Lemmy Caution.  Posing as a journalist, he attempts to nab Alpha 60’s creator, Professor Von Braun, and take him back to the Outlands.  If that doesn’t work, his instructions are to “liquidate.”

For 1965, Alphaville must have been off-the-wall bizarre because even today, with all our expectations of the genre thanks to the 1980s, its darkly comical irreverence is as jarring as the psychological incongruities.  It deserves a place in sci-fi history along the likes of Metropolis or 2001: A Space Odyssey. When I look at the much lauded Blade Runner through eyes that have finally been exposed to Alphaville, I can’t help but feel a even more disappointed in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi noir flick.  Worse, when I think of Scott directing an adaptation of Brave New World (set to star Leo DiCaprio), I can’t see him doing better than Godard does with Alphaville.

Alphaville, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Anna Karina and Eddie Constantine, is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.