“His films are interesting. He upsets the official cinema, which cares only for profits. He taught films how to use disorder.” Robert Bresson (1)
No other filmmaker, living or dead, is as big a bone of contention among film critics as Jean-Luc Godard, who, now 90 years old, is the last of the Nouvelle Vague, hanging in there – as my Army drill sergeant put it – like a fifty-pound booger. That contention was a whole lot fiercer in the 1960s, when, arguably, his work mattered more. More than fifty years after the event, there are still a few holdouts who maintain that Godard is not just the greatest filmmaker of the French New Wave, but one of the most important artists who ever lived. Not surprisingly, the critics who hold such views are also diehard "auteurists."
Nearing the end of his very long life (97 years), Stanley Kauffmann confessed that one of the things he most wanted to do was to watch the early films of Godard again so that he could reassess their value. It was his way of admitting – one supposes – that he regretted having failed to take Godard seriously in the ‘60s, when it would’ve mattered. The most surprising thing about Kauffmann’s second thoughts about Godard is that he was one of a bulwark of critics in the 60s who unilaterally dismissed Godard – Dwight Macdonald, John Simon, Vernon Young, and Charles Thomas Samuels.
As for the other critics, among whom I count such mortal enemies (though they are both dead) as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, Kael set the tone of incoherence in her review of Alphaville, Godard's ninth film, with the line, “The picture is brilliant, yet it's no good.” But awhile later (1998), Sarris claimed that “To understand and appreciate Alphaville is to understand Godard, and vice versa.”
So, not being a fan of either science fiction or Godard, I took a good look (on my device of choice) at Alphaville. The plot goes something like this: Lemmy Caution, under the alias Ivan Johnson, a reporter for the newpaper Figaro-Pravda, arrives by night in a metropolis called Alphaville from the Outer Countries and checks into a hotel. The bellboy who takes him to his room is a young blonde who promptly takes off her clothes and gets into the tub. An assassin appears in the bathroom out of nowhere and attacks Caution, who beats him down but the intruder escapes after smashing through three glass doors. The girl turns out to be a “level three seductress”. Soon after he sends her away, Caution is visited by Natasha Von Braun, who is at least a flesh and blood woman – even if you wouldn’t know it from her heavy makeup. She is the daughter of Professor Von Braun, who is the creator of Alphaville’s super-computer and the man Caution has been sent there to kill. Caution falls in love with Natasha, but she has no understanding of such emotions.
Caution meets a fellow agent, Henry Dickson, just in time to watch him die in the arms of another seductress. Dickson's final act is to show Caution a book beneath his pillow, which Caution reads in a taxi moments later. It is Eluard’s Capitale de la Douleur. The text takes on great significance as Caution teaches Natasha that poetry is the supreme expression of freedom.
Godard isn’t optimistic for the future as long as the world keeps going down the current track it’s on. He foresees an anti-human scientific authoritarianism, the world run by a super computer. When Kubrick made 2001: A Space Odyssey, he wanted to depict a time when space travel is as commonplace as air travel on earth. He wanted to make strangeness (things like walking and eating in zero gravity) seem familiar. Godard, abetted by a small budget, accomplishes the opposite: he makes the familiar seem strange. He asks us to look at the world (Paris, circa 1965) with new eyes. The ugly steel-and-glass buildings Godard uses to depict his futuristic Alphaville are modernistic, and by now totally out of date.
Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution in Alphaville. It was his eighth appearance in the role, created by English crime writer Peter Cheyney. Constantine seems to spend half his time playing with his Zippo lighter (he once even lights it with a bullet fired from his .45). Apparently, Godard insisted that he wear no makeup, and the raw features of his face present a stark contrast to Anna Karina’s heavily lacquered beauty.
It isn’t very difficult for an old filmgoer like me to pinpoint the attraction of Alphaville. Film is not at all what it was in 1965, and not simply because I am not what I was. (I was just 7 when the film was first shown. It would be another decade before I even heard the name Godard.) Perhaps the only attractive aspect left of Godard’s early films, from Breathless to Masculin, Feminin isn’t just their playfulness. In Godard’s case, it’s anarchic – if rather strained – inventiveness making up for the absence of form. Whatever Godard may have achieved in his work, the sheer aplomb with which he blazed his own trail is fascinating today.
Praise Raoul Coutard’s luminous cinematography (the second opening credit of the film reads “PHOTOGRAPHIÉ EN ILFORD HPS PAR RAOUL COUTARD”), Eddie Constantine’s honest, pockmarked face, Akim Tamiroff’s turn as an undercover agent, and a mostly nocturnal Paris doubling as Dystopia (impossible!), but don’t take the rest too seriously. It was somewhat typical quasi-art in the mid-60s, something for film club members to love or to hate.
Despite having a quasi-plot that can be followed, I found Alphaville to be little more than a clumsy attempt at surrealism. It reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled, which some critics mistakenly labelled “Kafkaesque.” In his review of the novel, James Wood called it “a five-hundred-page dream-narrative.” He also warned that “The danger of using an unreliable narrator is that the narrator is always reliably unreliable, and thus a little unreal, a fake, since his unreliability is manipulated by the writer. Indeed, without the writer's reliability we would not be able to read the narrator's unreliability.” Jean-Luc Godard is probably the most unreliable filmmaker who ever lived.
(1) Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972).
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