Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 science-fiction drama and pastiche, “Alphaville” (which I discuss in this clip) is, among other things, an exemplary use of genre conventions and cinephilic references to explore the filmmaker’s philosophical ideas and intimate concerns. Having already wrangled with the notion of advertising’s version of mind-control in “A Married Woman” (and invented a distinctive modernistic abstraction to evoke it visually), he turned to the new realm of high-powered computers (a theme suggested to him by Michelangelo Antonioni when they met at the Venice Film Festival in 1964) and, after visiting computer firms in New York and France, decided to make a film about them. Or, rather, he had wanted to make an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s science-fiction novel “I Am Legend” (which was already the basis of his 1962 short film “Le Nouveau Monde”) and wanted to emphasize its vampire element, but his producer didn’t agree. He also wanted to adapt Brian Aldiss’s science-fiction novel “Non-Stop,” set in a flying spaceship-as-city, but knew it would be too expensive.
Instead, Godard filtered elements of these stories into this dystopian secret-agent story, which he then infused with details, references, and styles of German silent movies (fusing wild subjectivity with sharp moralism) and American detective films (with their snappy disdain for authority)—and filmed on location in and around Paris. For Godard, a society run by technocrats in thrall to their machines was inimical to art and to love; he turned that future society, the fictitious Alphaville, into a tyranny that banned those notions and punished them by death. In the midst of it, he placed, in effect, the last man of conscience, and put him there to rescue a woman, whom he brings around to his humanistic values. And the actress who played that role, Anna Karina, had been his wife; they had divorced shortly before the start of filming. It’s as if the film sets in synch the cosmos at large and the filmmaker’s personal life; as such, it’s one of the great cinematic works of romanticism, as well as a sort of filmed revelation of the very essence of science-fiction movies and German silent classics—their blend of social critique, emotional liberation, and paranoia.
