Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (46 page)

Lemmy Caution’s mission in Alphaville is to find two men—the secret
agent Henri Dickson
¹¹
and the scientist Leonardo von Braun.
¹²
But when he gets there he meets Leonardo’s daughter, Natasha, played by Anna Karina, who had been born in the “Outer Lands” but was brought to Alphaville as a child too young to remember anything else; she works there as a “seductress,” a prostitute. He falls in love with her, though she literally does not know the meaning of the word
love
, which is forbidden there (along with all other illogical thought). He confronts her father, destroys the computer that runs Alphaville, helps Natasha to recognize that she is in fact from the Outer Lands, takes her away from the ruined city, and teaches her the meaning of love.

The film is an allegory as radical as that of
A Married Woman:
Karina is held captive in an evil empire of mind control (indeed is an unwitting prostitute), but she would reclaim her virtue and be able to love the lucid and intrepid man who loves her—if only she were free. The film’s scenario, with its action-genre clichés and simplistic onesidedness, is remarkably cartoonish. So much does it resemble a comic strip in tone that, to advertise the film to the industry as the shoot got under way, Godard had his assistant, Jean-Paul Savignac, distill the film’s story into an actual comic strip that stretched over two pages of
La Cinématographie française
, and included a panel of Constantine and Karina face to face in the backseat of a car, with these words inked in: “I love you, beautiful and cruel Anna Karina!” “Me too, Lemmy, but I’m afraid!!!” [
sic
]
¹³

Alphaville
was set in a transparently contemporary future that drew most of its traits from the alienating aspects of ordinary life; as Godard said, “We are already living in the future.”
¹⁴
He filmed in the studios of French national radio, in the vast computer research complex of Bull (with its spinning reels of magnetic tape and the consoles of blinking lights of a powerful new computer called Gamma 60),
¹⁵
in the new modern office and residential complex of La Défense, just outside Paris, and on newly built roads running through tunnels glowing with eerie banks of lights.

As for the mind-controlling computer itself, “Alpha 60,” it was, Godard said, “a little three-dollar Philips fan, lit from below.”
¹⁶
The computer’s muffled, uninflected voice was provided by “a man whose vocal cords were shot away in the war and who has been re-educated to speak from the diaphragm.” The use of actual locations and objects to represent the dystopian future reflected Godard’s tendentious view of the modern world: he said that
Alphaville
was “really about the present,”
¹⁷
of which the film’s presumptive “future” was really just a
projectio ad absurdum
of what he saw occurring in the world in which he lived.

T
HE SHOOT WAS
, even by Godard’s standards, unusually stressful, because of his own anxieties and demands. He spent the first days driving around Paris
with Constantine and Coutard but could not commit to attempting a single shot, even as the clock ticked on an international coproduction with one of the biggest stars in France. Then, as Constantine recalled: “He phoned me after three days: ‘I have the story now, I’m going to write it.’ In the morning he wrote, from nine o’clock to noon, at two o’clock we started to rehearse, and then at five we started to shoot.”
¹⁸

Godard made extreme demands of his crew and of Raoul Coutard in particular. To realize his idea of making the present look like a dystopic future, Godard used an unusual and risky photographic technique. He wanted to create a look of extreme high contrast without using any movie lights regardless of low-light conditions. Godard heard that the London-based film manufacturer Ilford (responsible for the sensitive film used in
Breathless
) now made a 35mm motion picture film that could be processed to achieve very high photosensitivity, and he visited the firm’s laboratory in London to become acquainted with the techniques required to do so. To be sure of getting the darkness he wanted, he shot the film at night, allowing Coutard to add only an occasional incandescent lamp.

Coutard was leery of Godard’s plans and warned him that the film would be black and unexposed. To protect himself against just this danger, Godard did an unusually large number of takes, shots, and angles. Suzanne Schiffman recalled:

Alphaville
was shot pretty much without any light, in the dark. Coutard said, “We’ll put a little light, and I’ll stop down the lens, it will amount to the same thing, it’ll be very dark.” Godard refused: always the need for the real. He shot without movie lights, with a special film that was very fast, but even so!… It became the joke of the film: “We won’t see a thing!” “Yes, but we’re shooting anyway.” The result: three thousand meters of film were unusable. Godard did not redo everything. Some shots were eliminated, others were put into the film as is.
¹⁹

The schedule proved to be very difficult for the crew. They were being paid the daytime rate despite shooting all night, and soon they went on strike. Godard, who had no budget to pay for the overages, was then compelled to shoot in the daytime with windows blacked out. Schiffman considered the results indistinguishable, but Godard cried that he was being “sabotaged” by his crew.
²⁰
Coutard, considering that Godard felt, more than ever, the constraints imposed on his artistic creativity by the need to work with others, told Schiffman, “He’d like to swallow the film and process it out his ass—that way he wouldn’t need anyone.”
²¹

The only person who submitted intrepidly and unquestioningly to Godard’s
methods was Eddie Constantine. One side of Constantine’s face was heavily scarred, and in his prior films, he was usually slathered with makeup; often directors just avoided filming his scarred side. Godard, however, allowed no makeup, used harsh lighting, and filmed Constantine from any and all angles, revealing the actor’s face in all of its craggy humanity. For Constantine, honesty was a professional risk. If in the end the gamble won the actor new admirers from a new audience, many of his longtime fans were not pleased.

F
OR
A
LPHAVILLE
, G
ODARD
borrowed the cartoonish narrative style and apocalyptic tone (and a great grotesque of an actor, Akim Tamiroff, in the role of Henri Dickson) from the American low-budget science-fiction films of the 1950s. (Tamiroff also played a key role in Orson Welles’s
Mr. Arkadin
, and his performance as Dickson, his final work, was largely modeled on it.) Godard also borrowed the coolly brutal heroism of American detective movies. He relied on the styles of the popular cinema to make his message as clear as possible: the film was a broadside and would look and feel like one. The film’s main fund of references came from the German “expressionist” cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s, yet its relation to those works was more than mere
hommage—
it was a metaphorical threat, a stylistic warning (akin to the references to Auschwitz in
A Married Woman
) that the same social depravities were in the offing as those foretold by the menacing shadows and ferocious hauntings of the Weimar German cinema.

Godard called
Alphaville
“a film about light. Lemmy is a character who brings light to people who no longer know what it is.”
²²
It begins with light deployed in a system of signs: a close-up of a round traffic light that flashes against total darkness as if in Morse code. Lemmy Caution is seen in his car, in deep nocturnal shadows; he lights his cigarette with a Zippo lighter, which illuminates his face. Soon there is another close-up of a traffic light, then another of a glowing signal arrow pointing left. The lights from the windows of the railway cars on an elevated métro line, and the headlights from cars below, loom unnaturally and fantastically strange.

Godard’s insistence on filming
Alphaville
with available light was not just a matter of hasty practicality or an artistic tribute to the gravelly images of the low-budget private-eye genre. It was also a metaphorical approach to a philosophical point about the cinema. As even amateur photographers know, scenes that look normal to the naked eye may come out on film as impenetrably dark. For Godard,
Alphaville
would be the transformation of ordinary unproblematic views into strange and alienating ones, by way of the movie camera. “The sensitive film gives the image a lunar aspect,” Godard explained. “It was very important to me. I wanted an expressionistic style. In filming things that we see every day, I wanted them
to arouse fear. Without cheating. The things are there. One looks at them. And suddenly, one discovers that they are not at all as one thought.”
²³
The camera in
Alphaville
shows not a distortion of reality but a hidden or inner reality: what appears to the naked eye as an adequate brightness is revealed in fact to be a dangerous darkness, exactly as a person of apparently healthy aspect can be revealed by X-ray or MRI to be seriously ill. Here, Godard used the movie camera as a scientific instrument, attempting to put his faith not in the way things appeared but in what filming them might reveal.

For the same reason, Godard created the film’s imaginary futuristic inventions by using everyday artifacts in surprising ways: a high-style jukebox becomes a surveillance device; a small round traveling alarm clock is a cordless telephone; a set of apartment-lobby call buttons serves as a futuristic pay phone. The alienation through technology that
Alphaville
depicts as future dystopia is in fact that of the present day.

The provocation that Godard intended was political as much as social. Lemmy Caution, the agent, comes from what remained of the old world (“Nueva York,” “Tokyorama,” “Angoulême City”), introducing himself into the city-state of Alphaville under false pretenses as “Ivan Johnson,” a reporter for
Figaro-Pravda
. The blend of Communist East and capitalist West recalls a remark by Godard regarding his opposition to “all forms of socialism, whether Kennedy’s or Khrushchev’s”;
²⁴
the idea was central to his conception of the film. When the critic Jean Collet said that the film reminded him of Georges Bernanos’s book
La France contre les robots
(France Against the Robots), Godard responded avidly:

I re-read this book, which I like a lot, before making
Alphaville
. There is even an entire sentence from the book in my film. What is magnificent, is that Bernanos wrote
France Against the Robots
at a time when electronic programming did not exist. And this book is current. Bernanos was a prophet.
²⁵

Despite the title, Bernanos’s book is not futuristic; it is a frantic, rhetorical essay, written during World War II from the author’s self-chosen exile in Brazil, extolling a distinctive French alternative to the ideological struggles of East and West. He decried the attendant militarism of that conflict, as well as both sides’ thrall to technology and bureaucracy, and called for a France free of such burdens. Bernanos contemptuously denounced what he called the three great modern “Democracies”—“the English imperial Democracy, the American plutocratic Democracy, and the Marxist Empire of the Soviet Dominions”—as fronts for “a sort of State socialism, the democratic form of dictatorship,” preferring “a French tradition of Liberty,” exemplified by the
revolution of 1789.
²⁶
He further argued that “the Modern State, the Technological Moloch, in erecting the solid foundations of its future tyranny, remained faithful to the old liberal vocabulary, covering or justifying with that liberal vocabulary its innumerable usurpations.” Bernanos considered mechanization and technology to be the avatars of this new universal tyranny, and thus feared America as much as he did the Soviet Union, wondering incredulously about “this Truman, this politician of business, without breeding, without a past, without culture, who must have blind confidence in the Civilization of Machines.”
²⁷
Bernanos asserted fiercely that “French civilization, heir to Hellenic civilization, has for centuries striven to form free men, that is, men fully responsible for their actions: France refuses to enter into the Paradise of Robots.”

Like Bernanos, Godard was and remains a conservative revolutionary whose utopian visions are moralistic and aesthetic. Godard’s insistence on Karina’s character, Natasha von Braun, having been born in the Outer Lands and rediscovering her origins as a precondition for emotional fullness recalls Bernanos’s nationalist, race-bound traditionalism and anticosmopolitanism. The pontificating computer Alpha 60, the electronic tyrant of Alphaville, declares, in lines that are also reminiscent of Bernanos: “In the so-called capitalist world or communist world there is no malicious intent to suppress men through the power of ideology or materialism, but rather the natural aim of all organizations to increase their natural structure.” Like Bernanos, Godard considered both the capitalist and communist worlds to be equally inimical to the values of life, love, and, crucially, art.

When Lemmy finds the debilitated and destitute secret agent Henri Dickson, the broken spy laments what the “pure technocracy” of Alpha 60 has destroyed: “Artists, novelists, musicians, and painters. Today there’s nothing. Nothing.” An official “seductress”
²⁸
(who, like all of Alphaville’s seductresses, is tattooed with numerals on her neck) comes to Dickson’s room and makes love to the old man, who collapses with the effort, as Lemmy Caution hears his dying words: “Conscience… conscience… destroy… make Alpha 60 destroy itself… tenderness… save those who weep.” Dickson reveals a book hidden under his pillow: a collection of poems by Paul Eluard,
Capitale de la Douleur
(
The Capital of Pain
), which Lemmy slips into his pocket. In Alphaville, poetry will prove to be the pathway to conscience, to love—and to freedom.