Some more films, eh, while I’m in the mood…. on a roll—better sip from the cup while there’s something in it. Spoilers, of course, or what would be the point?

First off, Alphaville (1965), which reverses the ostensible relationship between humans and machines: the machines run the people. (Which is to say, it accurately predicts the Internet.) Alpha 60, the central computer, literally codes human consciousness by means of a continually updated “Bible,” which turns out to be a dictionary of acceptable words (à la 1984). The criterion for inclusion is “rationality,” with emotional words removed and replaced. It seems that lacking the word for “love” removes the capacity for it. Alpha 60’s voice is electronically degraded and sinister, an articulated croak that sounds more weary to me than evil. Must be exhausting operating all those humans at once! Anybody who defies the semantic order is executed most peculiarly: machine-gunned off a diving board, then finished by lovely knife-wielding female swimmers. (Imagine the job description in THAT Help Wanted ad!) I’m thinking the script wanted sharks, but chicks are cheaper (and très jolies).

The supervillain scientist who created Alpha 60? Professor Von Braun! Named after the Paperclipped Nazi (and father of the German V2 rocket) who delivered America to the Moon (as well as global missile dominance). Godard was clearly based.

Sweetly, Von Braun’s daughter Natacha is introduced to love by Lemmy Caution, visiting from the Outer Planets—our lone noir hero bustling energetically against all this totalitarian oppression—who spirits her out of the city (after killing her father, natch) so that she can finally utter the syllable that will release her soul from its captivity in Daddy’s machine (three syllables, actually: “Je vous aime.”). Natacha is played by Anna Karina, who I now understand was Godard’s wife and muse at the time, which explains so much… can’t blame him in the least, she’s got that, you know… how do you say… Je ne sais quoi. So far, her evocation of Laurie is most pronounced in Vivre sa vie (cf. previous post), but I see flashes of it in these other films. Less so in Alphaville, admittedly. Her character is mostly a robot, under the thumb of Alpha 60.

The film’s so dark, taking place at night, and frenetically confusing, that I always struggle with wakefulness watching it. This was my third attempt and the first one in which I even caught the central thrust of the film: that it’s about an evil computer, etc. My two previous attempts (years ago, folly of youth) didn’t even get me that far! So maybe I am a touch more ready for Godard now….

I have to wonder if HAL from 2001 (1968) is modeled after Alpha 60. Both are embodied by CU’s of a lightbulb, brightening and dimming as it processes and communicates information. Reverse shot with CU on the human interlocutor, emphasizing the gulf in both form and function between a person and a computer. HAL’s voice is smooth and affectless, like a deep state bureaucrat, whereas Alpha 60’s voice is damaged and effortful, Henry Kissinger in French. In both cases, the voice is omnipresent, you almost feel it’s being spoken directly to the mind, bypassing the impurities of physical transmission. If God were to speak to you, would he make the air molecules move? Or would he reach directly into the molecules of your consciousness and move THEM?

You could view Alpha 60 as a metaphor for God, I think: a manmade engine of social control, operated by an elite class to enslave a mass populace through the manipulation of language and culture. How does an individual match up to that? (Well, he doesn’t, obviously, not in real life, anyway.) Lemmy’s solution: be a firecracker and a loose cannon, and fly off the handle unpredictably and therefore uncontrollably. Whatever. Didn’t seem to work for the Beats or the Hippies, did it? Did it work for anybody?

Lemmy Caution is apparently an actual character from French pulp noir films, played by the same actor, Eddie Constantine. Godard really loves smooshing pop culture into his films! He stuffs Kafka and Rimbaud impersonators into Band of Outsiders (1964)… as wanna-be gangsters! They team up with Anna Karina (named Odile after a character from Raymond Queneau, which I know NOT from consulting online oracles but from watching the film: Odile literally buys a copy of the eponymous book from a newsstand and reads from it) to steal money from her uncle. Is he her uncle? I’m a little unclear on the relationship, actually.

Interesting dynamics between Odile and her amorous litterateurs: she seems to find Arthur more exciting, accepting his proffered cigarettes immediately after rejecting Franz’s, which if these guys are their namesake authors, I totally get. Rimbaud’s far more exciting! But this fellow in the film is really more akin to the sleazy, post-poetic, gunrunning Rimbaud, version 2.0, not the ecstatic adolescent synesthete we all adore. He even pours liquor in her Coke while she’s not looking. Blech!

Franz eventually manages to turn Odile’s attention on him by turning his own attention… on us! He gives us one of those patented Godard 4th-wall breaking monologues, in which he professes his love of Jack London and tells a story about an Indian in Alaska who’s banished from the tribe for being a liar, so he goes out on his own and sees the civilized world, finally returns home to his village and describes the trains and the airplanes and the massive buildings the size of mountains… and the tribe banishes him again for being an even worse liar. Somehow, this story seems to break some of Odile’s ice, enough at least that she ends up with him in the end, whereas our favorite poetic gunrunner ends up dead in a ridiculously staged, completely unserious shootout.

There are a couple of what I would term “orgasmic” scenes, in one of which the trio vigorously dances for several uninterrupted minutes in a café, and in the other of which the trio runs through the Louvre “in record time.” I think 9 minutes 43 seconds? Beating the previous record-holder (an American, of course, who else would run through the Louvre without looking at the paintings and congratulate himself for his speed?) by 2 seconds. I can’t help but see these scenes as threesomes. Everything was in code back then. Nowadays, these would have been explicit sex scenes. Am I wrong?

Wow, I had more to say on these movies than anticipated…. There really is something to writing thoughts out, isn’t there? They multiply and reinforce each other. So easy to forget all that fun stuff, even for someone who’s soi-disant “a writer.” I couldn’t even watch a movie for three straight months, frankly, much less write about it. I just sat in a chair. I’m still sitting in that chair, of course, but at least I can distract my mind to some degree for the time being. Trying to keep trying….