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.
Rating: 
Summary: New Wave Sci-Fi Epic
Review: Godard creates a harsh distopian future city--not by building elaborate sets, but by simply filming the most stark, impersonal, ultra-modern facades in Paris for outdoor shots and using brightly lit white interiors. It works as well as anything in *Blade Runner* or *Alien*(except for the car-as-spaceship thing which is still a great metaphor).
Rating: 
Summary: Hmmm
Review: Godard is a very talented filmmaker and quite the visionary but there is one HUGE mistake that Mr. Godard might not have considered while making Alphaville and that is the voice of Alpha 60, the computer that runs Alphaville. The voice is probabaly the most grating, annoying voice I have ever heard in a motion picture. It sounds as if the speaker is talking as he is choking and his nasty breaths and weezes can be heard. Maybe that was the effect that Godard was going for but I think it creates a serious problem when one tries to view the film. Other than the awful voice, Alphaville in a fun trip.
Rating:
Summary: Still great after all these years!
Review: Godard made this movie over 30 years ago and it remains fresh. It is timeless, the hallmark of a genuine classic. There are no fancy special effects. Godard used the Paris of the 60s to delineate Alphaville, a metropolis of mechanized people. He blends pulp fiction, film noir, sci-fi, comics, poetry and philosophy and the result is unusual and dazzling. Eddie Constantine is the perfect grizzled private eye and the sublime Anna Karina gives a poignant performance as Natasha Von Braun. Raoul Coutard's cinematography is a milestone in moviemaking.
Rating: 
Summary: Sci-fi in the real world.
Review: Godard's "Alphaville" isn't a sci-fi cartoon, or even a
futuristic fantasy: it is a comic-strip meditation on technology and man's place in a world which embraces it -- the precursor, as it were, to the Unabomber Manifesto, albeit
one which doesn't take itself so seriously. Godard's words, indeed, are as bombs in this all-out attack on the
disintegration of emotion, language, and love in the modern
age. He is famous as a film director, but his direction was often casual and hurried; what makes his films move are the quickness of the ideas and the verbal slapstick of the dialogues. Worth reading if you've never seen the film, or
if you've seen it a hundred times.
Rating:
Summary: Godard's A #1.
Review: Godard's best film, in my judgment. Certainly his most cerebral. Manages to be quite affecting and parodistic all at once--not an easy feat, even for a Frenchman. Naturally such a sensibility is alien to the American mindset. Most Americans would hate this. In fact, it may be fair to say that *Alphaville* is the litmus test for whether or not a person can handle French New Wave cinema: if you make it through this one, baby, hey, look up--it only gets easier. It's about a French Mike Hammer-type called Lemmy Caution (an amusing name for English speakers--another of Godard's calculated effects) who drives on up to Planet Alphaville by way of a Ford Galaxy. Suspend your belief, baby. This is sci-fi cinema by way of Elizabethan theatre. His secret mission: either assassinate or kidnap a mad technocrat named Vonbraun (get it?) who has created the evil Alpha 60 supercomputer. Along the way, he runs into "seductresses, third-class", Vonbraun's daughter (Anna Karina in the height of 60's fashion), an old friend and former fellow-agent (Akim Tamiroff, doing a hilarious impression of Orson Welles in *Mr. Arkadin*), various other assassins, bureaucrats, garage-park attendants, and even Alpha 60 itself. What does it all mean? I have a relatively good idea, but I don't kid myself for one second: Godard's having a bit of fun w / us, here. Too much analysis and you'll be climbing the walls, like certain characters late in the film. Just watch and enjoy . . . if you can. The photography by the master Raoul Coutard, incidentally, is even better than usual, and that's saying a lot.
Rating:
Summary: Godardonia
Review: Godard's brilliant sci-fi film whose theme is shared by such works as Zardoz, THX-1138, etc. The story is similar to Apocalypse Now, a man on a mission to terminate the enemy's command. Alphaville is run by a hoarse voiced computer(chainsmoking precursor to Hal?)whose pervasive influence has organized the city into a lab-mall of zombies. Lemmy Caution is a Bogart-like hero, cynical like Yojimbo, but with a hidden but strong sense of individuality.
Alphaville is a biting satirical indictment against modern society, of everything from technology trapped within its circular logic to desensitizing and narcotic influence of pop culture. One may argue that Lemmy Caution, like Dick Tracy, is a pop cultural icon, therefore part of the problem, yet Godard seems to be arguing that truth or romance or poetry isn't a matter of science or myth, high art or low art, but a sense of individuality. Whether involved in a drawing a comic book, writing a book, or making a movie, what matters is one's commitment to one's own vision, good or bad, sane or insane.
Along with Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and Chris Marker's Le Jetee, this is intellectual sci-fi on a very high order.
Rating:
Summary: 'Absurdity' as a Teacher
Review: Godard, famous the world over with the art house, college course, and critic corner, has here, made a piece so absurd and in the extreme which creates a needed desire to view the '65 film. Within the same breath as sci-fi fantasy modern satire overpopulation history imploding upon itself hysterical nonsence overall dehumanization sadness wit born out of suffering lost in a vacuous sucking system of rule where even anarchy has become dull and pointless living non-living automaton where love is only a reflex automation bombardment constant forced labotomy imagery of a so called so named hopeless modernization salvation. Are we to conclude that we only can "learn" from black and white dogma, lines of good/bad, common love/hate? No, yet a certain learning can be gained from the hyperbole, the extreme, and absurdity. Of course, the world has changed faces a dozen times over since '65 and ideals come and go. Some proven beneficent, others perfectly cataclysmic. ... However, one can learn from the darkest periods of this past century alone (and what you learn is really of your own doing and construction). So the movie has classic original overtones and gritty reality met by brutish characters and eerie mechanized beings floating through scenes with at times misplaced soundtrack in foreground interspersed with street/billboard-like signs setting a desired mood and pace. ...
Rating: 
Summary: One the century's ten worst movies!
Review: I do not understand why all those other reviews are so positive about this movie, because it has to be the most boring movie I have ever seen. It is slow, the story does not make any sense whatsoever, and contains countless conversations about the meaning of life. Just Plain Stupid. This would only appeal to Hardcore French movies lovers, i.e. 1% of the population at best (I happen to be French, by the way). If you enjoy US Sci-Fi movies, then do not watch this because it is so different that you will probably stop watching after 10 minutes. I almost did, and afterwards I wish I had. This was a waste of my time.
Rating:
Summary: A Review
Review: I rented this movie and thought my TV was not working because the color was all faded and I turned the knobs and the dials but I still could not get the color to work. So I think this movie has real bad color. At any rate it has a guy named Lemmy who says, "Lemme tell you this and lemme tell you that!" and he was always telling me things even when his lips were not moving.
And then he meets a pretty girl but she just kind of walks around in the movie like she is a friend of someone and didn't have anything better to do in real life. And then Mister Lemmy says, "Lemme introduce you to the director. He is French!"
And then Lemmy talks to a light bulb. I mean it is real big. And the light bulb talks back.
Well Lemmy tell you this: One star for the pretty girl. One star for the talking light bulb.
But zero stars for the color.
|
