CINEMA
Godardphobe
Alphaville. (Academy One, 'A' certificate.) WM th I his dark, dense personality in the ser- vice of a few pea-sized ideas, Jean-Luc Godard arouses extremes of admiration and repulsion: and Alphaville has more Godardisms packed in per second than anything yet. His fans will have a field-day, for you need a glossary of Godard terms to follow it and a close knowledge of Godard's heroes, tastes, read- ing and jokes to get the real ripe flavour of its heroes, tastes, literary allusions and (above all) jokes. An in-film for addicts, in fact.
Outsiders will have an uncomfortable time, almost hysterically bored by the brooding pom- posity of so much of it, by the reiteration of philosophical chestnuts, by the sludgy soft- centredness under the glittering hard surface of Godard's style; and yet, reluctantly, not going to sleep, not handing round peanuts, not actually once looking away. The eye that has made cer- tain townscapes, rooms, faces, walks and gestures recognisably its own won't let you, once inside
the cinema, escape it. And, as with every Godard film, the old form-and-contents argument turns
up; because Alphaville may be ponderous and
unoriginal in what it says, but there's no deny- ing it puts its platitudes across with enormous verve. Even the vicious violence with which the simplest actions are carried out has something compelling about it, because the world it reflects is vicious and violent and Godard swims in it, futuristically at home.
Perhaps in Alphaville he seems more at home than ever because it is actually set in the future; it shows a world his more realistic fantasies have suggested, in which every mania and interest can be used almost fetishistically, irony and joke and allusion interwoven into so close-knit a pattern that you can't tell where one ends and the next begins: American B-pictures, thrillers, pop-art, death by cold violence, Anna Karina at her feyest, political references, literary chitchat, codes and ciphers, science-fiction, fabulous tech- nology. computers, brainwashing, mass pictur- esque execution, manners almost ludicrously loutish—it is as if he had emptied a trunkful of mental images and obsessions on the floor, then. as if using a kaleidoscope, put them into some sort of formal order.
Alphaville is the city of the future—though it still looks pretty much like Paris or any- where else. Lemmy Caution, craggy-faced secret agent, follows Flash Gordon and other mythical heroes sent to a distant galaxy from earth to find von Braun. mysteriously missing since the middle 'sixties when he rocketed off. In Alphaville he has established the anti-human state where computers rule and logic takes over from passion: but he has, of course, a still-human daughter able to learn how to mouth the words le ... vous . aime,' and thus magically restore the balance of the uni- verse, or at least save her soul. (Ironic cheers, as in Batman, seemed called for here.) After much shooting of anyone he meets, guilty or not, Lemmy Caution establishes the values of love and humanity. Ironies and jokes of a moral sort are so closely plaited together in this absurd conclusion that what Godard means (as opposed to what he says) is hard to tell. You might call it a sort of pop-morality. So the prolific Godard speaks again, a kind of Delphic juke-box.
ISABEL QUIGLY
Previous page
