Rating: 
Summary: the greatest sci-fi film ever: not a special effect in sight
Review: 'Alphaville' is Jean-Luc Cinema Godard's 'The Wizard of Oz', the story of an American stranded in a strange fantasy city, who must find its controlling wizard before he can return home, evading forces sent to destroy him. Eddie Constantine reprises the role of Lemmy Caution that made him famous in 1950s France, as the roughneck FBI agent who fisticuffed, dame-bothered and slang-winked his way through a series of simple-minded thrillers. here he has become Special Agent 003, sent by his superiors in the Outlands to assassinate Professor Von Braun, the brains behind Alphaville, a futuristic city controlled by a philosophical computer, and which bears more than a passing resemblance to Gaullist Paris. Alphaville is a classic dystopia, its minions brainwashed, dehumanised and branded; photographs of its leader on every available wall; the surveilling computer present in every room. dissidents are tortured or murdered in elaborate rituals (e.g. diving-board firing-squads in swimming pools before a gallery of socialites). Double-talk couched in the complexities of dialectic numb the brain; dictionaries are censored daily. Much of the fun in Godard films of this period lies in their playfulness with familiar cinematic genres; and the trappings of the gangster and spy genres, the detective story and sci-fi adventure (brawls, shoot-outs, car-chases, interrogations, (literal) femmes fatales etc.) are made ridiculous by their slapstick treatment, comic exagerration and over-emphatic music. 'Alphaville' may be a pulp adventure, but the world Lemmy must negotiate is not one of genre, but of ideas, about reality, history, politics, freedom, love, poetry, dreams, the mind, logic, conformity, escape, all reverberating in an environment based on One Big Idea. 'Alphaville', like Chris Marker's similar 'La Jetee', is less a futuristic satire than a reflection of contemporary France (its dark and dense mise-en-scene like a negative photograph of the familiar city; with its extraordinary modern architecture reconfigured as a giant prison), with memories of the recent Nazi Occupation. But, as its name suggests, Alphaville is also the first (cinematic) city of post-modernity, where meaning and authority is decentred, where language ceases to have any shared value, where time ceases to exist, the past and future are abolished, and the mindless live in an eternal present, unable to learn from mistakes or hope for improvement, unable to acknowledge the value of culture. Lemmy seems to be set up as a very 'human' interloper, a repository of 'our' feelings and values in a culture that would seek to suppress them. But Godard called him a Martian', and he is a stranger to Alphaville, which, after all, is our world: he is a figure from pulp fiction , a risible set of signifiers who can only offer Natasha a choice between who gives her orders. Most dystopias, like '1984' and 'Blade Runner', ultimately fail, because they are as cold and inhuman as the worlds they portray. 'Alphaville', especially in its visionary climactic half hour, shares more with Nabokov's novel 'Bend Sinister' - positing whimsy, idiosyncrasy, gags, Surrealism (Eluard, Bellmer), pop art, the absurd, the unexpected, the daft, the poetic, the aesthetic, the cinematic (especially Melville's 'Deux Hommes Dans Manhattan'), Anna Karina's gorgeous coats against the Brave New World. But we shouldn't get too comfortable in this ''us vs. them', anti-totalitarian model: Professor Von Braun, with dark, impenetrable shades permenantly welded, is the clean-cut image of the director; he too forces Anna Karina (his daughter, Godard's wife) to perform for strangers and suppress her personality; he, like Godard, is the creator of Alphaville.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Transfer of Great Film with NO Extras
Review: ...Needs no introduction. The Criterion DVD is subpar only due to lack of extras (hence the three stars). Very strange for Criterion. Nice transfer of a beautiful print with generous chaptering. Still, a trailer or at least some production stills would have been nice.
Rating:
Summary: Great Transfer of Great Film with NO Extras
Review: ...Needs no introduction. The Criterion DVD is subpar only due to lack of extras (hence the three stars). Very strange for Criterion. Nice transfer of a beautiful print with generous chaptering. Still, a trailer or at least some production stills would have been nice.
Rating:
Summary: A poetic & hilarious homage.
Review: A poetic & hilarious homage to silent German expressionist cinema. Well worth watching every five years. If you can see a fresh B&W print at a decent public movie theater, do so. Wonderful photography. Until then, video is OK. And keep a good dictionary (ie "Bible") by your side. It's a dark world; you'll need it.
Rating: 
Summary: Ultimate film for quintessential pseudos
Review: A silly, ugly, pretentious, inept, embarrassing, shallow, dreary film that was dated the day it was made.
Rating:
Summary: Over the Moon about this movie
Review: A sixties time capsule if ever there was one. Atmospherics reach in and grab you!, big time
Rating: 
Summary: New Wave films the movie equivalent of modern art?
Review: Alphaville in this reviewer evokes a reaction similar to looking at certain examples of modern art, a painting by, say Ad Reinhardt. Although I can not argue it is "great" or even good, for some unexplainable reason I like it. As Picasso once remarked " If one tries to "understand" a painting he is barking up thr wrong tree". I am convinced this argument can be made for almost any art form (and perhaps other things as well). And if one likes it, is that not all that matters?
Rating:
Summary: True cinema
Review: As someone observed earlier, Leonard Maltin is anything but an educated reviewer. His opinion, as well as other seemingly reputed reviews (see "Video Hound's Golden Movie Retriever"), comes from a certain culture, best embodied by the Texas resident below. "Alphaville" is, simply, a masterpiece, and represents in many ways the peak of an evolution in cinema, where movies truly become a form of art and accomplish catharsis, beyond the "pure entertainment" model. Stay away from it, though, if your favorite kind of film is "Dude, Where's My Car?" or if you think "Starship Troopers" is simply a slam-bang/special effects carnival.
Rating:
Summary: An Analysis of Genre
Review: As usual with Godard moments stand out. In this film the most absurd sequence involves a diving platform in what looks to be an eastern bloc recreational center and a number of black sweatered and bereted revolutionaries with sub-machine guns standing on the pool deck spraying the divers as they dive. Whats it all mean? Well I suppose you could say its Godards way of commenting on the wests ability to turn even political oppression into mass entertainment. I like a number of Godard films: Breathless, My Life To Live, Contempt, Pierrot Le Fou, First Name: Carmen, Hail Mary, In Praise of Love --still Alphaville remains kind of a hard one for me to get into. Perhaps because I am not too keen on science fiction. It seems the people who like this film are the ones who like science fiction in general. To me science fiction is full of cliches and so is film noir and so to me it seems Godard is using these genres to address cultural cliches -- and yet he is also making pointed comments on modern culture as he does so. You can always count on a Godard film to be smart and even though its not one of my favorites Alphaville is no exception to that rule. Anna Karina looks great as always. Unfortunately for Lemmy Caution she is the daughter of Alphaville's overlord. No one really believes the future will look like a parking garage nor that a super-computer will run our lives and that people will become vacant automatons. Only a handful of early twentieth-century authors thought the future was leading us toward Alphaville. In the context of the swinging sixties sci fi just looks campy and noir even campier. Whats going on in Godards head? Hard to say in this film. To me its funny, but a surprising amount of people seem to take this sci fi stuff seriously. I think the new wave band of outsiders enjoyed genre hopping because it gave them a chance to flex their movie knowledge. Plus genres come loaded with rules which the new wavers can then subvert -- so that is the fun of Alphaville, subversion of genre and in this case its a double dose of subversion because Godards subverting two genres, sci fi and noir. I think its interesting to note that in both of these genres men and women relate in steretypical and fatalistic ways -- and the new wave was about being hyper-conscious of these film conventions. Perhaps what Godard is really saying is that in order to invent life anew we must break free of these conventions. This is of course something his characters often fail to do although in some films they try.
Rating: 
Summary: French Fried Orwell
Review: Curate a screening of Godard's *Alphaville* for today's Digerati. Snag as many technocrats, cognitive logicians, Kripkean analytical philosophers, MIT scions, and 80K-a-year knowledge-workers as you can. Solicit written responses, interview and exit-poll all participants, organize post-screening discussion forums and commission Internet listservs. Then collate and publish your results. Will a single respondent feel threatened, unhinged, pressured, or destabilized by Godard's film in any way? Will palms sweat? Will nerves twitch? Will pulse-rates tweak their median? Will personae jangle into self-scrutiny? More tellingly, will anyone identify *personally* with Von Braun, or the Tracheotomy 6000 supercomputer, or the starry-eyed meat puppets of Alphaville? Or would it be the pomo gunslinger Lemmy Caution who would centrifugally soak up the room's empathic vibes? As any Wired magazine subscriber knows, today's technocrats perceive themselves as Byronic cyber-noir blade runners who shoot from the hip with the same stiff-lipped abandon as Eddie Constantine. They are, in effect, much closer to the alchemical thaumaturgy of Doc Faustus than the neurotic, pre-Wittgensteinian positivism on display in Godard's profoundly silly, genre-slumming film. *Alphaville* is not quite schlock -- it is, rather, an artfully contrived, theoretically-riven visual artifact that models itself precariously on, well, schlock. Less a node of useful, psychosocial critique than a metaphor-laden Soviet theme-park of the hyperreal. For when played counterpoint to the culture is traduces, *Alphaville* reads like a closed parenthesis. A cryogenic monoculture with as much relevance to today's raging technosphere as Walt's EPCOT or Roddenberry's Enterprise -- a flimsy, hermetic, cardboard future that substitutes over-allegorized cartoons for concrete historico-political analysis. To wit, in today's wired world, *Alphaville* is rather like a sugar-pill trying to fight cancer (read globalization), an over-ironized audiovisual strobe of kinaesthetically potent nothings. Godard never seems to get *past* Orwell, to say or do anything Orwell didn't already say and do better. Complacent, ivory-tower critics who persist in hailing *Alphaville* as "prophetic" are bluffing behind a weak hand, victims of a syndrome Lewis Mumford once called "the myth of the machine": a knee-jerk iconography of industrial monoliths, top-down hierarchies, concrete-and-steel quicksilver cosmopoli, gleaming white terra-cotta, ultra-noir culverts and back alleys, circuit-board labyrinths, lobotomized citizen-automata, Kafkan corridors of misdirection and telescoping distance.... Godard's film contributes to this secularist melodrama of centralized power, giving us solitary Lemmy Caution-like figures penetrating into the heart of vacuum-tubed mainframes, liberating all of humanity through a pistolwhipping Chandler-esque machismo. Even before the age of ubiquitous, non-centralized networks, things were *never* this simple. The "swarm intelligences" of modern capitalism make Godard's film something of a hokey, cheesy, laughable nonthreat. For today, the computational power of Godard's Alpha 60 has been subsumed by portable high-end laptops. Hacker subcultures of Kabbalistic programming-visionaries and radical biologists unleash their entrepreneurial insect-clouds of indie start-ups, and the nodal points and acupuncture meridians of Western tech-wealth become radically de-centralized. Godard must have known that true-blue globalization could never triumph if its customers were grinded down into cold, somnambulant, serotonin-deprived techno-drones. If the Alpha 60 did not allow us the fickle, insatiate, fluctuating palette of a poetic vocabulary, how could we be expected to *articulate* our myriad addictions to a toxic surplus of products and services? If we're not permitted to "think" and "feel," how can we conceptualize and poeticize our perverted need for more *stuff*? Godard's Alphavilleans don't seem to consume much of anything, champing the bit of an Eastern Bloc-style fascism as quaintly irrelevant as some dead-tech Byzantium. Laurie Anderson once remarked that Virtual Reality wouldn't look "really real" until the engineers learned to put some *dirt* into it. The motive behind "antiseptic" science-fiction of the Godardian cast (all gleaming orthogonal surfaces and industrial techno-mazes) is to allow the artist-auteur to foreground allegorical iconography against a glass-and-steel canvas of postmodern nothingness. In Godard's future, "logic" is the totemic overlord of a culture that has elevated science to the mutant edge of theocracy, brilliantly visualized through Godard's cinematic language (a perennial fetish for tenure-track academic code-breakers). But such visionary/symbolic foregrounding gives the lie to the squishy, dirty, fluxional, irascible hyper-minutiae that affords science-fiction its long-toothed visceral bite, its qualifying *worldliness*. Ergo, we cannot *enter bodily* the world of Alphaville any more than we can "enter" into a Piet Mondrian painting. The angles are too sharp, the allegories too thick, the personae too ornamental, the phantasmic aura too boiled-down and hypostasized. Big heavy cinderblocks of Metaphor. The American religion of cinematic *pyrotechnia* that Godard helped create and define (the paganized moving image coopting the ascetic, linear grammatology of we People of the Book) had stormed the citadel of Alphaville long before Lemmy Caution started pumping its functionaries full of lead. Many SF writers of the 1960s already understood that technological advancement is, at its far-flung mutant edge, too destabilizing a force to produce a Godardian future. The threat of nuclear devastation may have nihilized and benumbed us, brought Alphaville closer to the center of things, but the competitive techno-fervor that Sputnik ignited between East and West spawned the gooey, messy, paradigm-shattering waves of information technology that would transpose global power to the private sector. The "intelligence wars" between Russia and the U.S. are the quaintly antediluvian fossil-record to the economic and culture wars now being waged in virtual realities more byzantine than the mind of a Borgesian librarian after three cups of psilocybe tea. Godard's metaphors say nothing interesting or original about this society. It's all French-Fried Orwell, a tendentious art-house riff on Soviet-style infrastructures that no longer exist in the First World. Godard's hamfisted treatment of SF tropes is a permanent embarassment, an introverted quirkfest, a famously bad film that takes the poseur's road of cobbling together the trashy, desultory, pop-culture elements of the genre, with nary a breath of futurological fresh air to help remit our escalating future shock. Postmodern irony and comic-strip *bricolage* just doesn't cut it when you tout yourself as a "political" filmmaker. Godard's *Alphaville* is a crude anthology of faux-Orwellian logorrhea and slushy, maudlin swill about "logic" and "the human heart." A strange and appalling artifact.
|
