4th EDITION

International Film Heritage Festival

Yangon, 4 – 13 November 2016
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Alphaville
Jean-Luc Godard
France – 1965
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Cast: Eddie Constantine (Lemmy Caution), Anna Karina (Natacha von Braun), Akim Tamiroff (Henri Dickson), Howard Vernon (Prof. Leonard Nosferatu aka von Braun)
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Éluard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production: Athos Films, Chaumiane Filmstudio
Language: French
Duration: 100 min
Color: Black and White

Synopsis: In a near future, the American secret agent Lemmy Caution travels to Alphaville posing as a journalist named Ivan Johnson from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. His mission is to find the missing agent Henri Dickson and to convince Professor von Braun to come with him to Nueva York. Von Braun is actually Leonard Nosferatu, inventor of the powerful computer Alpha 60 that has engineered the inhuman dystopian society of Alphaville. Here love, conscience, poetry, and emotion have been banished, and words are systematically eliminated from the dictionary. To deal with the omnipresent Alpha 60, Lemmy recruits the help of Natacha von Braun, the evil scientist’s daughter. They fall in love, but he needs to complete his mission before leaving Alphaville.

Notes:
Like much of science fiction, Alphaville employs the appearance of a futuristic abstraction: a clean slate onto which viewers can project their fascination and fears, in an attempt to negotiate contemporary developments and discourses. The fictional Alpha 60 computer, for example, has roots in the historical world. This machine was modeled on the Gamma 60, a large-scale French-made processor used by corporations like Electricité de France, whose headquarters and facilities provided the setting of the central complex that houses the film computer network’s core. In the 1960s, mass computerization occurred against a backdrop of fears concerning the role of the individual within society: from state policy concerning systems of governance to the intellectual shift away from existentialism, an influence on Godard, toward the structuralist movement and its general disinterest in human agency. The intertwined realms of technology and technocracy, in particular, played a major role in the modernization of postwar France. The world portrayed by Godard exists as a fictional variation of Ellul’s “technological society,” in which Alpha 60 and Professor von Braun have conditioned the population to deny the existence of human freedom. As Caution enters the city, he is greeted with a sign: “ALPHAVILLE. SILENCE. LOGIC. SECURITY. PRUDENCE.” No parameter of Alphaville’s existence, not even the weather, extends beyond the harness of science and technology.

Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan often opposed those who sought to critique advanced technology, seeing the computer as a pivotal tool. He perceived the computer as an amplification of humanity, as opposed to a means of suppressing what was essentially human. Although this position can and has been justly critiqued, McLuhan’s ideas – as well as their popular reception, where ambivalence was often overlooked in favor of evangelical zeal – remain useful in revealing the utopian rhetoric of the period. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Godard was directly aware of the writings of Ellul or McLuhan, Alphaville nevertheless explores the fundamental oppositions of a world increasingly rooted in technics, technocracy, and the technological society.

Like his New Wave contemporaries, Godard criticized mainstream French cinema’s “Tradition of Quality”, which emphasized craft over innovation and privileged established techniques and technologies to experimentation and improvisation. His films were a direct challenge to this tradition and express his political views: he was an avid reader of existential and Marxist philosophy. Well into his 80s, Godard continues to work on films that carry his signature social criticism, seeking effective artistic responses to political conflicts and challenges both internationally and in France.

Notes based on Utterson, Andrew. “Tarzan vs. IBM: humans and computers in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.” Film Criticism no. 1 (2008): 45.