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buzzdixonwriter · 3 years

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ALPHAVILLE

Alphaville is a film you must watch.

Not “watch” in the conventional sense, where you passively sit and let sound and image wash over you, the type of slickly made / often entertaining mainstream factory pap that explains the plot points every fifteen minutes for anybody who went to the bathroom / checked their phone / nodded off in the interim.

“Watch” in the sense you must follow it close, actively paying attention to what unspools before you.

It is not a difficult film to follow, but you’ll be lost if you blink.

Alphaville the motion picture can be described several different ways.

One way -- the most common way, the easiest to reduce down to a simple logline -- is the producers of the Lemmy Caution movies (a European version of the Sam Spade / Philip Marlowe type of private eye character) threw caution to the wind and asked then La Nouvelle Vague wunderkind Jean-Luc Goddard to direct the next installment of the character’s adventures, resulting in a weird / off beat combination of film noir and sci-fi.

This would be like the Shaft franchise asking David Lynch to direct an entry.

Another way -- and in my view, far more accurate yet more difficult to explain -- is that Alphaville is a series of discussions on philosophy / theology / poetry covered with a dream-like patina of surreal tough guy antics.

Goddard, a film and pop culture maven since childhood, wisely mixes science fiction with stereotypical private eye tropes to bring these discussions to life.

The science fiction aspect is the first and foremost element, but the world of the private eye is needed to make Alphaville complete.

Science fiction enables Goddard to bring deep philosophical questions up to the surface by couching them in sci-fi terms that let them be treated as concrete concepts instead of abstract ideals.

Alphaville isn’t the first film to do that, not by a long shot, but the challenge in using sci-fi to discuss big ideas is that the spectacle of the genre may overpower the theme, the form triumphing over the content.

Metropolis, as superlative as it is, is a prime example of that.

Goddard’s stroke of genius lay in double filtering his message through the stereotypes and cliches of private eye fiction. Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution is brutish and confrontational but uses that as a physical shield to protect a very human soul. This enables Goddard, through the character, to anchor the flighty intellectual aspects of the story in a grim and gritty reality that filmgoers could readily identify with.

Even at its most grim and gritty points, Alphaville continues to play with pop culture, tongue firmly in cheek in the manner in which it examines its questions, but like a prophetic parable carrying a far deeper and more profound meaning than apparent on first blush.

The plot is very pulpish, suitable for either Planet Stories or Black Mask Detective.

Caution, posing as a journalist for Figaro-Pravada but actually secret agent 003, arrives at Alphaville, the capital of a far distant planet (or galaxy; Goddard either not knowing or not caring about the difference and using the terms interchangeably throughout the film).

Alphaville appears identical to Paris of 1965, and indeed references in the dialog suggest the story is taking place in the very near future.

Ostensibly there to do a story on Alphaville, in reality he’s tracking down two men: Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), an American scientist formerly known as Nosferatu who has gone to Alphaville and established himself as the de facto human face and hands of Alpha 60, the computer that runs the society; or failing that, locating Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), a previous Earth secret agent sent after Vonbraun who apparently vanished.

Caution’s mission is to return Vonbraun / Nosferatu or kill him; his superiors are aware Vonbraun is guiding Alpha 60 to launch a massive war against the rest of the galaxy. (Why Alpha 60 thinks this war is a good idea comprises the true heart of the picture.)

Caution is met soon after his arrival by Natacha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), a computer programmer for Alpha 60 and the (apparently adopted) daughter of Professor Vonbraun. She unintentionally manages to arrange an encounter between Caution and Vonbraun, resulting in Caution being targeted for first interrogation then recruitment by Vonbraun and Alpha 60.

If you’ve never heard of Alphaville before this, you may be imagining this in grandiose Blade Runner style, but Goddard wanted his film grounded in reality so he shot using real locations, no special effects (other than the screen images turning negative in a few instances), and no elaborate props or costumes.

Alphaville literally is Paris of 1965, and the soulless laboratories and indoctrination centers and police stations are what was then mid-century modern architecture.

What makes Alphaville the society so alien is that Vonbraun through Alpha 60 turned the world into a completely logical / unemotional civilization. Goddard combines nods to Russian Communism, Orwell’s 1984, and French existentialism to shape the society of Alphaville, at first glance seemingly so like our world, but soon revealed in word and gesture to be radically different.

Gene Roddenberry got logical civilizations all wrong with the planet Vulcan. A logical civilization would not become a world of high minded aesthetics but rather of haunted, empty human souls using sensuality in lieu of spiritual values.

Despite its supposedly logical / non-individualistic nature, Alpha 60 acts to preserve itself. It relentlessly controls the population through language and censorship, hammering down any outbursts of individuality or spiritual leanings (spiritual here expanded to more than conventional religion).

This desire for self-preservation, fueled and guided by Vonbraun, manifests itself in its plans for galactic war aimed at subjugating all other planets so that they may never threaten Alpha 60 (the film leaves as a far question which came first, the egg of Alpha 60’s antagonistic plans, or the hen of the other planets sending agents like Caution to thwart them).

Goddard was no computers expert and he made Alphaville long before artificial intelligence research moved from the theoretical to the practical, but he nonetheless raises an interesting issue: Alpha 60’s oppressive nature is clearly hardwired into its cybernetics by Vonbraun, yet Alpha 60 displays enormous curiosity in the very human traits it strives to eliminate while Vonbraun feels so sure of himself as Alpha 60’s chief architect that he fails to realize his creation is truly thinking for itself, not following the guidance he programmed in.

Much of the philosophical inquiry in Alphaville centers on religion, but here Goddard doesn’t use “religion” in the conventional term of a set of dogmas and creeds too often followed blindly and slavishly by the uninquisitive and the superstitious, but in the difference between philosophy and theology.

Theology is best described as a sub-set of philosophy dedicated to things of the spirit (i.e., abstract, not necessarily supernatural). It reflects how we think and feel about unknowable and unprovable concepts.

Philosophy and ethics can be tested; we can see if the golden rule is a viable philosophy to follow, we can judge if one view of how the world works is more accurate than another.

As stated, the key difference is that philosophy never presumes to postulate a final answer, and when it offers an insight it never claims that insight represents absolute reality.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is philosophy because it reflects a view of reality never meant to be taken literally; far too often religious devotees insist their parables be taken literally and at face value, not any deeper, more meaningful one. Caution defeats Alpha 60 in the end by luring the computer into a trap of its own devising. Unable to grasp why humans value love and emotion and things of the spirit, it searches for meaning where it can find none because as advanced as it is, it cannot intuitively grasp their importance.

Alpha 60 realizes it is a little tin god, and in its futile attempt to elevate itself to the next level ends up destroying the very fabric of Alphaville’s social order.

Caution drives Natacha away from Alphaville to safety in the end, cautioning her like Lot’s wife not to look back. Natacha responds with a tentative expression of emotion: "Je vous aime" (and notice the use of the formal vous instead of the more intimate tu, she is starting to regain her humanity but a long road remains ahead of her).

In terms of execution, Alphaville is an extremely economical looking film (as well it should be since everything was shot on existing locations using the light weight cameras the French New Wave loved so dearly). The alienness comes across in the societal mannerisms, the elliptical dialog, and the odd juxtapositions found in the city.

Case in point: The phrase "I'm very well, thank you, you're welcome. Don’t mention it" is repeated frequently in the film.

At first it sounds like a typical social bromide, but as it is used again and again it takes on a more ominous, then sinister meaning.

It is not a polite thanks and dismissal but a warning, both to others and the speaker, not to entertain certain ideas.

Alpha 60 tries to control the citizens of Alphaville by controlling the language, banning certain words, changing the meanings of others. Characters refer to looking something up in the Bible more than once in the film, but only later is it revealed the Bible of Alphaville is a dictionary, and the salvation found within is the accepted language of the day.

The film maintains a dream-like quality throughout. Like most dreams, it certainly carries a strong, realistic feel yet at the same time is populated by surreal events and juxtapositions.

This dream-like quality plays well off the stereotypical private eye derring-do. Hard boiled shenanigans pop up almost randomly yet oddly not unexpectedly throughout the film viz Caution getting involved in a fist / gun fight with a hotel detective trying to spy on him as a “seductress third class” attempts to seduce him. It’s less than a minute of wild slam bang action and then it’s dismissed as if it never occurred, with Caution and the seductress continuing their cat and mouse game.

The film juxtaposes the opulent hotel lobby where Caution first checks in with the seedy rundown hotel lobby where he finds Dickson. The latter seems scarcely larger than Dickson’s seedy room, yet is crowded with its own staff (each engaged in some impossible to define task) and its own seductress third class waiting for clientele.

One of the most iconic scenes in Alphaville are the executions. Rebels against Alpha 60 (i.e., people who read =gasp!= poetry) walk out on a diving board over a swimming pool and are shot while making their last statement.

As they fall in the water a line of bathing beauties dive in, swim over, and drawing knives administer the coup de grace to the victim by repeatedly stabbing them underwater.

Which, incidentally, brings us to another point we need to acknowledge: How Goddard, Alphaville the film, and Alphaville the society treat women.

From our perspective almost 60 years later, we can look back at Alphaville and excuse its depiction of women by saying it was simply parodying the style of private eye movies of the era.

Which is true…but not enough.

Both French culture at that time and movies in general did not present what we’d consider an enlightened view of gender politics, and the females of Alphaville are all there for eye candy.

In some cases it works: The aforementioned synchronized bathing beauty executioners are so ludicrous as to be funny in a grim way, yet there are no other non-eye candy female characters to balance them out (there is a female cab driver, certainly unusual casting for a mid-1960s film, but she’s as gorgeous as all the other women).

And while one gets the idea behind each hotel employing professional seductresses (as an amenity in the world of Alphaville, as a commentary on the commodification of human relations in the film), today our reaction is more along the lines of “Is this really necessary?”

Far be it for me to tell Jean-Luc Goddard how to make movies, but it seems there could be half a dozen or more alternative ideas that would get the same point across without reducing women to this role.

Even Anna Karina’s Natacha gets subjugated to this mindset, serving mostly as a tour guide until the end of the film where she finally starts engaging more directly with the central conflict.

It’s not a comfortable look today, but we can live with it when viewed as a commentary on the style of the era. Compared with the Bond movies or almost any counter-culture film of the 1960s, it’s hardly the worst offender.

Here’s where I’m supposed to wrap things up and tell you to go watch the movie.

Okay, go watch the movie.

I’m not going to be hyperbolic and proclaim Alphaville a great movie because it’s a film set so far apart from the mainstream of cinema and the genres it mashed up that it’s not even an apples and oranges comparison but more like apples and the sound of autumn rain on the roof.

But seriously, you need to watch this movie.

#Alphaville #Jean-Luc Goddard #Lemmy Caution #science fiction #sci-fi #film noir #cinema #French New Wave #philosophy #theology #poetry #religion

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marginalgloss · 4 years

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a dream of north

I don’t recall exactly when I first read Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. It must have been in the late 1990s, since I’m fairly sure it was after the release of the sequel, but definitely before The Amber Spyglass came out. (I was very excited for that one.) I would guess I was no more than twelve or thirteen. It seems a little odd now to think that initially these were promoted as books for young people. My edition was published by Point, the Scholastic imprint best known for pulpy teen horror fiction; in a bookshop today you are more likely to find a new edition of one of Pullman’s novels dressed up in handsome pastel colours, with a more ‘artisanal’ cover style. Which is fine, and well-deserved. But my copy is the same one I read more than twenty years ago; I know this because it is missing the top-right corner of the last thirty pages or so, having once been lovingly chewed by a late lamented family dog.

Northern Lights is not a long book, and in many ways it feels like a quick sketch of a fast-moving story, one which is touches lightly on the world in which it depicts. By the standards of genre fantasy or science fiction, there isn’t a lot of detail here. We follow Lyra, a young girl growing up in an alternate Oxford — it might be some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, by our standards. Through a combination of accident and concealed design, Lyra is drawn into a conspiracy that involves two aspects: an expedition to the distant arctic in search of a mysterious particle called ‘Dust’, and a conspiracy to kidnap children and transport them to this same far northern region. What follows is an adventure in pursuit of Lord Asriel, a man Lyra believes to be her uncle, while alternately monitored and pursued by a sinister rich woman called Mrs Coulter. This race to the frozen North forms pretty much all of the main body of the book.

For the most part it rolls along at a storytelling pace: one thing happens, then the next, then the next. It really does have the rhythm of a story one might tell out loud to children, over many bedtimes. (Consider the frequent asides about what Lyra must eat, and where she sleeps — so often a chapter will end with her curling up to sleep in some sheltered corner of a forsaken place.) It doesn’t come across as overly considered. With a few exceptions, the book doesn’t often slow down to explain itself. If a reader were so inclined I’m sure it would be possible to poke holes all kinds of holes in the plot. Even by the end of the novel I didn’t feel entirely sure what Dust was, nor did I really understand what the antagonists were trying to do with it. Are they trying to destroy it, or to control it? And some of it seems whimsical, in the best possible sense. Want a Texan cowboy with his own gas-powered balloon and a talking bear for a best friend? Why not? It’s fun. It may be whimsical but that isn’t to suggest it’s frivolous; the author’s imagination comes from a place of experience, from deep reading. It’s a world that fascinates, even as it seems to resist scrutiny.

Something else which surprised me on returning to this book was the near absence of any explicit references to organised religion. There are mentions of something called the Magisterium, but it’s far from clear what their role is in the story, while a passing mention of ‘Pope John Calvin’ seems like a sort of gentle joke for older readers. This seems significant because at a certain point after the final book in this series was released, public discussion of Philip Pullman’s work became centred around his attitude to organised religion. By then a new populist atheism was having a kind of resurgence — people were talking about ‘the New Humanism’ or ‘New Atheism’ as if it were something to be excited about. Pullman would be loosely associated with this movement, insofar as his books could be championed by people who might proactively define themselves as atheists.

But to the best of my knowledge, his statements on these matters have been altogether more measured, and less definitive. I’m curious now to revisit the later novels and consider the extent to which they really have much to do with atheism at all. It’s been a while, but it always seemed to me that the atheist reading was worth unpicking from the anti-religious impulse in these novels. There is a certain amount of what you might call ‘fantasy spectacle through hard science’ in Northern Lights — the many-worlds theory, the vague invocations of particle physics, all of which was so excitedly summarised by the New Atheism as the ‘wonder’ of the universe — and yet I’m not sure the novels are altogether so content to settle on a purely materialistic view of reality.

The big idea of Northern Lights is in the daemons. They are a beautiful idea, and the book’s story could easily be read as one long pursuit of this idea. What if every person was born with an animal companion which represented — no, which actually was — an indivisible part of their being? As if we all had another organ of personality, like a second brain or a second ‘heart’, linked to our bodies by an invisible thread. The notion has the genius quality of immediate appeal to all ages. Children (and many adults) love the idea of a permanent animal companion, while older readers may appreciate the associated philosophical concepts: the shadow self, or psychological anima; or just the little angel/devil on our shoulder.

Perhaps the existence of the daemons a kind of heresy, as much as it implies that each person’s soul (for want of a better word) belongs essentially to themselves. There are no refunds, and a daemon is not subject to exchange; a daemon is not the property of some other high power, gifted at birth and reclaimed at death; they might not even be properly said to belong to their ‘owner’, any more than their person-companion belongs to them. Still, in spiritual terms this might be characterised as a problem of accounting rather than of blasphemy. There is a lovely image presented early on of the crypts under one of the Oxford colleges, where great people are buried alongside precious tokens depicting the forms of their daemons. Even in death they belong to one another, though the account into which they have been deposited remains a mystery.

After the reader is introduced to the associated rituals and taboos, it is the pain of separation from one’s daemon that becomes a sort of leitmotif in this book. All this is expressed incredibly well — the sense of separation anxiety is perhaps the most memorable aspect of the whole story. It is unpleasant for one’s daemon to be handled by another person, and it is literal agony to be separated from it by more than a very short distance, and so when the reader discovers that children are being severed from their daemons it seems like an uniquely agonising kind of cruelty.

The allegories for this ‘cut’ are more explicit than I remember. At times it is directly compared to castration or genital mutilation. Lobotomy might be another comparison. The procedure seems to have a uniquely devastating effect on children — it seems that adults have undergone it without such dramatic effects — but as with much in this book, that much is never explained. Again, it’s unclear why the procedure is happening at all. Nobody seems to be gaining anything by it. It is like one of those pointless bleak cruelties we find in Roald Dahl. It’s something to do with Dust, we’re told, and it is dependent on the unique relationship that children have with their daemons before they reach puberty. But that it is hard to rationalise is, I think, part of the point.

Hanging over it all is the horror of institutionalised abuse. It is the kind of abuse that needs no justification, any more than senseless vivisection does. It is merely the pulling apart of a thing to see how it works – for the cutter, the gratuity is its own reward. Perhaps in so far as we can find any meaning in it, it’s in the idea that growing up needn’t involve a sort of deliberate caustic severing of whatever it was that made us childlike in the first place. We may not need to put away childish things, and we certainly don’t need them to be torn from us. Perhaps growing up should be less like a departure from ourselves and more like a process of reification, in which something that was latent all along only becomes settled and manifest with the passing of time.

#books #philip pullman #northern lights

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