Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" (1965)

So it's Wednesday again and you know what that means...another screening report on an obscure strange movie! This time we're going with a French Science fiction/Mystery/Drama/Romance that is visually unconventional with philosophical themes. "Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution" features a detective entering a 1984-esque city controlled by the Alpha60 computer. The computer is slowly eliminating free thought and emotion to create a society of "normal" people. Give it try if you like!

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Godard’s “Alphaville” does not work within science fiction but merely uses its characteristically sterile and homogenizing style to express the necessity for love and free thought. The starkness and unfamiliarity of the genre underscores familiar emotional themes when they are presented. Through a series of oppositions, namely light and dark, logic and emotion, life and death, and freedom and oppression, Godard examines the importance of love as an expression of freedom.

The use of light in the mise en scène imitates the contrast of logic and emotion in the characters. The people of Alphaville wear dark clothing and sunglasses, in a sense blinding themselves to light, emotion, and freedom. This is particularly apparent upon inspection of Lemmy Caution’s clothing, which is always pale in colour. Also, the negative image interspersed with a “regular” image may indicate that Natascha and Lemmy are starting to comprehend one another’s perspectives of the world. Light and dark seem to become interchangeable after communication breeds understanding. The fluidity of knowledge, meaning, and understanding is also apparent in the rundown hotel when Lemmy visits an old friend. In the hall, he sends a bare bulb swinging like a pendulum sending shadows flying around the room.

Vampire references further reinforce this theme. Professor Von Braun was previously Mr. Nosferatu and Natascha is referred to as a vampire early on in the film. These characters, like most of Alphaville’s inhabitants, are almost constantly indoors and are afraid of the light (as it represents emotion/love and free thought). While Natascha reads poetry, which according to Lemmy Caution “transforms darkness into light”, the light flashes on and off as she distances herself from logic and nears an emotional understanding of her world. Up until that point her lack of emotional experience kept her enslaved.

A world of logic without emotion, or answers without questions is imbalanced and incomplete. Godard depicts this idea on a slide in the death room showing an exclamation mark and a question mark in perfect balance on either side of teeter-totter. The relativity of meaning is also expressed in the words of α60 saying, “An isolated word, or a detail of a design...can be understood. But the meaning of the whole escapes.” This imbalance explains the complete lack of conventional logic in Alphaville. The film’s recurring fluorescent “E=mc²”, a pillar of logic, is called into question next to “hf=mc²”. Women repeat: “I’m very well thank you” in illogical points in conversation. Lemmy Caution’s declaration that Natascha is a “Jolie Sphynx”, a phrase loaded with emotion, loses all meaning as it is repeated several times electronically. Without emotion, freedom, and history as comparisons, the citizens of Alphaville have no understanding of logic, oppression, and the present.

The importance of love as an expression of freedom is depicted most perfectly at the end of the film when Natascha says the words, “I love you”, saving herself from being “as lost as the dead of Alphaville”. This concept is explored thoroughly through the binary oppositions of light and dark, logic and emotion, life and death, and freedom and oppression on the robotic, emotionless backdrop of the science fiction genre.