One characteristic that united the French New Wave filmmakers was their admiration for certain genre films and well-crafted Hollywood features by iconoclastic directors like Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) is probably the closest the director has ever come to fashioning an entertainment inspired by his love of American movies. Its innovative mix of science fiction, film noir, pop art, and comic book influences make it his most accessible work if not his most thought-provoking. Godard also makes ironic use of B-movie stereotypes with the casting of Eddie Constantine as secret agent Lemmy Caution, a character Constantine had previously portrayed in a series of low-budget French thrillers.

Essentially a film about the threat of dehumanization in a technological society, Alphaville follows Lemmy Caution as he tries to locate a missing colleague from a city controlled by a power-hungry scientist and his super computer, Alpha 60. Caution's tour guide in this brave new world is Nastasha Von Braun (Anna Karina), a robotic slave of the system. In a plot twist that parodies the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Caution saves Nastasha from her preprogrammed existence and brings her back to the land of the living, an ending that anticipates the climax of Blade Runner (1982).

Filmed in Paris in the winter of 1965, Alphaville takes full advantage of the city's most futuristic buildings. The snail-shaped Maison de la Radio, the wing-topped Palais des Expositions at the Rond-Point de la Defense, and the office of Les Machines Bull (a computer company) make ideal locations for Raoul Coutard's dramatic contrasts in neon and total blackness. The fragmented music score by Paul Misraki also adds immeasurably to Godard's futuristic vision, which now seems more topical than ever.

Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Producer: Andre Michelin
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Cheyney (novel)
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Editing: Agnes Guillemot
Music: Paul Misraki
Cast: Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution), Anna Karina (Natasha Von Braun), Akim Tamiroff (Henri Dickson), Laszlo Szabo (Doctor), Howard Vernon (Professor Von Braun).
In French with English subtitles
BW-100m.

by Jeff Stafford