Alphaville, a Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution
Encyclopedia
Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965
black-and-white
French
science fiction film
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
. It stars Eddie Constantine
, Anna Karina
, Howard Vernon
and Akim Tamiroff
. The film won the Golden Bear
award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival
in 1965.
Alphaville combines the genre
s of dystopia
n science fiction
and film noir
. Although set far in the future on another planet, there are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris
, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (in 1965 they were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. In addition, the characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine
plays Lemmy Caution
, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney
. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic
dictatorship
of Alphaville.
with the code number of 003 from "the Outlands". Entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie
, he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson, and claims to work for the Figaro
-Pravda
. He wears a tan overcoat that stores various items such as a M1911A1 Colt Commander
automatic pistol. He carries the then new cheap Instamatic
camera with him and photographs everything he sees, particularly the things that would ordinarily be unimportant to a journalist. Despite the futuristic setting, references made in the film still set the action in the twentieth century.
Caution is, in fact, on a series of missions. First, he must search for missing agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff
); second, he must capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon
); lastly, he must destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.
Alpha 60 outlaws free thought and individualist concepts like love
, poetry
, and emotion
in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because'." People who show signs of emotion (weeping at the death of a wife, or a smile on the face) are presumed to be acting illogically, and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. In an image reminiscent of George Orwell
's concept of Newspeak
, there is a "Bible" in each room: actually a dictionary
that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society of mindless drones.
Alpha 60's dictates have had some surprising results. Caution is told that men are killed at a ratio of fifty to every one woman executed. He also learns that Swedes, Germans and Americans assimilate well. Images of the E = mc²
and E = hf
equation
s are displayed several times throughout the film as a symbol of the regime of logical science that rules Alphaville. At one point, Caution passes through a place called the Grand Omega Minus, whence brainwashed people are sent out to the other "galaxies" to start strike
s, revolution
s, family rows and student revolts.
As an archetypal American private eye anti-hero
in trench-coat and weathered visage, Lemmy Caution's old-fashioned machismo conflicts with the puritanical computer (Godard originally wanted to title the film Tarzan versus IBM). The opposition of his role to logic (and that of other dissidents to the regime) is represented by faux-quotations from Capitale de la douleur (Capital of Pain), a book of poems by Paul Éluard
.
Caution meets Dickson, who soon dies in the process of making love to a "Seductress Third Class". Caution then enlists the assistance of Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina
), a programmer of Alpha 60 who is also the daughter of Prof. von Braun (although she says "I have never met him"). Natacha is a citizen of Alphaville, and when questioned says she does not know the meaning of "love" or "conscience". Caution falls in love with her, and his love introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city that the computer has crafted in its own image. Natacha discovers, with the help of Lemmy Caution, that she was actually born outside of Alphaville. (The city name is given as Nueva York -Spanish
for New York
instead of either the original English name or the French literal rendering "Nouvelle York").
Professor von Braun (the name taken from German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun
) was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu (a tribute to F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu), but Caution is repeatedly told that Nosferatu no longer exists. The Professor himself talks infrequently, referring only vaguely to his hatred for journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville, even going so far as to offer him the opportunity to rule a galaxy. When he refuses Caution's enticement to go back to "the outlands", Caution kills him with a pistol shot.
Alpha 60 converses with Lemmy Caution several times throughout the film, and its voice is seemingly ever-present in the city, serving as a sort of narrator. Caution eventually destroys or incapacitates it by telling it a riddle that involves something Alpha 60 can not comprehend: poetry (although many of its lines are actually quotations from the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges
; the opening line of the film, along with others, is an extract of Borges's essay "Forms of a Legend" and other references throughout the movie are made by Alpha 60 to Borges's "A New Refutation of Time
"). The concept of the individual self has been lost to the collectivized citizens of Alphaville, and this is the key to Caution's riddle.
At the end, as Paul Misraki
's musical score reaches its crescendo, Natacha realizes that it is her understanding of herself as an individual with desires that saves her, and destroys Alpha 60. The film ends with her line, "Je vous aime" ("I love you").
Constantine came to the film through producer André Michelin, who had the actor under contract. Constantine had become a popular actor in France and Germany through his portrayal of tough-guy detective Lemmy Caution in a series of earlier films. Godard appropriated the character for Alphaville but according to director Anne Andreu Godard's subversion of the Lemmy Caution 'stereotype' effectively shattered Constantine's connection with the character—he was never again offered a Lemmy Caution role and reportedly said that he was shunned by producers after Alphaville was released.
The opening section of the film includes an unedited sequence that depicts Caution walking into his hotel, checking in, riding an elevator and being taken through various corridors to his room. According to cinematographer Raoul Coutard, he and Godard shot this section as a continuous four-minute take. Part of this sequence shows Caution riding an elevator up to his room, which was achieved thanks to the fact that the hotel used as the location had two glass-walled elevators side by side, allowing the camera operator to ride in one lift while filming Constantine riding the other car through the glass between the two. However, as Coutard recalled, this required multiple takes, since the elevators were old and in practice they proved very difficult to synchronize.
Like most of Godard's films, the performances and dialogue in Alphaville were substantially improvised. Assistant director Charles Bitsch recalled that, even when production commenced he had no idea what Godard was planning to do. Godard's first act was to ask Bitsch to write a screenplay, saying that producer Michelin had been pestering him for a script because he needed it to help him raise finance from backers in Germany (where Constantine was popular). Bitsch protested that he had never read a Lemmy Caution book, but Godard simply said "Read one and then write it." Bitsch read a Caution book, then wrote a 30-page treatment and brought it to Godard, who said "OK, fine" and took it without even looking at it. It was then given to Michelin, who was pleased with the result, and the 'script' was duly translated into German and sent off to the backers. In fact, none of it even reached the screen and according to Bitsch the German backers later asked Michelin to repay the money when they saw the completed film.
was one of the artists who exerted significant influences on Godard's films, and parallels between Alphaville and Cocteau's 1950 film Orpheus are evident. For example, Orphée's search for Cégeste and Caution's for Harry Dickson, between the poems Orphée hears on the radio and the aphoristic questions given by Alpha 60, between Orphée's victory over Death through the recovery of his poetic powers and Caution's use of poetry to destroy Alpha 60. Moreover, Godard openly acknowledges his debt to Cocteau on several occasions. When Alpha 60 is destroyed, for instance, people stagger down labyrinthine corridors or cling blindly to the walls like the inhabitants of Cocteau's "Zone de la mort", and, at the end of the film, Caution tells Natasha not to look back, like Orphée did to Eurydice
.
The voice of Alpha 60, played by a man with a mechanical voice box
replacing his cancer-damaged
larynx
, descends from the hypnotic power of Mabuse
's disembodied voice in the 1933 film The Testament of Dr Mabuse.
The film production company Alphaville Pictures
, co-founded in 2003 by Danish
director Christoffer Boe
, is named after the film.
German synthpop
band Alphaville
took their name from the film.
'Alphaville' - Track on Bryan Ferry's Olympia(2011) inspired by Film.
1965 in film
The year 1965 in film involved some significant events, with The Sound of Music topping the U.S. box office.-Top grossing films : After theatrical re-issue- Awards :Academy Awards:...
black-and-white
Black-and-white
Black-and-white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, is a term referring to a number of monochrome forms in visual arts.Black-and-white as a description is also something of a misnomer, for in addition to black and white, most of these media included varying shades of gray...
French
Cinema of France
The Cinema of France comprises the art of film and creative movies made within the nation of France or by French filmmakers abroad.France is the birthplace of cinema and was responsible for many of its early significant contributions. Several important cinematic movements, including the Nouvelle...
science fiction film
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...
directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. It stars Eddie Constantine
Eddie Constantine
Eddie Constantine was an American-born French actor and singer who spent his career working in Europe....
, Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
, Howard Vernon
Howard Vernon
Howard Vernon was a Swiss actor.Vernon was born Mario Lippert to a Swiss father and an American mother and was fluent in German, English, and French...
and Akim Tamiroff
Akim Tamiroff
Akim Mikhailovich Tamiroff was an Armenian actor. He won the first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.Tamiroff was born in Tiflis, Russian Empire , of Armenian ethnicity. He trained at the Moscow Art Theatre drama school. He arrived in the U.S. in 1923 on a tour with a troupe of actors...
. The film won the Golden Bear
Golden Bear
According to legend, the Golden Bear was a large golden Ursus arctos. Members of the Ursus arctos species can reach masses of . The Grizzly Bear and the Kodiak Bear are North American subspecies of the Brown Bear....
award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival
15th Berlin International Film Festival
The 15th annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from June 25 to July 6, 1965.-Jury:* John Gillett * Alexander Kluge* Ely Azeredo* Monique Berger* Kyushiro Kusakabe* Jerry Bresler* Karena Niehoff* Hans Jürgen Pohland...
in 1965.
Alphaville combines the genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
s of dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
and film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
. Although set far in the future on another planet, there are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (in 1965 they were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. In addition, the characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine
Eddie Constantine
Eddie Constantine was an American-born French actor and singer who spent his career working in Europe....
plays Lemmy Caution
Lemmy Caution
Lemmy Caution is a fictitious Federal Bureau of Investigation agent created by Peter Cheyney, who published the first book about him in 1936...
, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney
Peter Cheyney
Reginald Evelyn Peter Southouse Cheyney, known as Peter Cheyney, was a British crime fiction writer who flourished between 1936 and 1951...
. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic
Technocracy (bureaucratic)
Technocracy is a form of government where technical experts are in control of decision making in their respective fields. Economists, engineers, scientists, health professionals, and those who have knowledge, expertise or skills would compose the governing body...
dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
of Alphaville.
Plot
Lemmy Caution is a secret agentSecret Agent
Secret Agent is a British film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on two stories in Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. The film starred John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, and Robert Young...
with the code number of 003 from "the Outlands". Entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie
Ford Galaxie
The Ford Galaxie was a full-size car built in the United States by the Ford Motor Company for model years 1959 through 1974. The name was used for the top models in Ford’s full-size range from 1959 until 1961, in a marketing attempt to appeal to the excitement surrounding the Space Race...
, he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson, and claims to work for the Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
-Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
. He wears a tan overcoat that stores various items such as a M1911A1 Colt Commander
Colt Commander
The Colt Commander is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, and recoil-operated handgun based on the John M. Browning designed M1911. It was the first mass-produced pistol with an aluminium alloy frame and the first Colt pistol to be chambered in 9mm Parabellum.Colt made several...
automatic pistol. He carries the then new cheap Instamatic
Instamatic
The Instamatic was a series of inexpensive, easy-to-load 126 and 110 cameras made by Kodak beginning in 1963. The Instamatic was immensely successful, introducing a generation to low-cost photography and spawning numerous imitators....
camera with him and photographs everything he sees, particularly the things that would ordinarily be unimportant to a journalist. Despite the futuristic setting, references made in the film still set the action in the twentieth century.
Caution is, in fact, on a series of missions. First, he must search for missing agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff
Akim Tamiroff
Akim Mikhailovich Tamiroff was an Armenian actor. He won the first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.Tamiroff was born in Tiflis, Russian Empire , of Armenian ethnicity. He trained at the Moscow Art Theatre drama school. He arrived in the U.S. in 1923 on a tour with a troupe of actors...
); second, he must capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon
Howard Vernon
Howard Vernon was a Swiss actor.Vernon was born Mario Lippert to a Swiss father and an American mother and was fluent in German, English, and French...
); lastly, he must destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.
Alpha 60 outlaws free thought and individualist concepts like love
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
, poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, and emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because'." People who show signs of emotion (weeping at the death of a wife, or a smile on the face) are presumed to be acting illogically, and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. In an image reminiscent of George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's concept of Newspeak
Newspeak
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it refers to the deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state. Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained...
, there is a "Bible" in each room: actually a dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society of mindless drones.
Alpha 60's dictates have had some surprising results. Caution is told that men are killed at a ratio of fifty to every one woman executed. He also learns that Swedes, Germans and Americans assimilate well. Images of the E = mc²
Mass-energy equivalence
In physics, mass–energy equivalence is the concept that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. In this concept, mass is a property of all energy, and energy is a property of all mass, and the two properties are connected by a constant...
and E = hf
Planck postulate
The Planck Postulate , one of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, is the postulate that the energy of oscillators in a black body is quantized, and is given byE=nh\nu\,,...
equation
Equation
An equation is a mathematical statement that asserts the equality of two expressions. In modern notation, this is written by placing the expressions on either side of an equals sign , for examplex + 3 = 5\,asserts that x+3 is equal to 5...
s are displayed several times throughout the film as a symbol of the regime of logical science that rules Alphaville. At one point, Caution passes through a place called the Grand Omega Minus, whence brainwashed people are sent out to the other "galaxies" to start strike
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...
s, revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
s, family rows and student revolts.
As an archetypal American private eye anti-hero
Anti-hero
In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
in trench-coat and weathered visage, Lemmy Caution's old-fashioned machismo conflicts with the puritanical computer (Godard originally wanted to title the film Tarzan versus IBM). The opposition of his role to logic (and that of other dissidents to the regime) is represented by faux-quotations from Capitale de la douleur (Capital of Pain), a book of poems by Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
.
Caution meets Dickson, who soon dies in the process of making love to a "Seductress Third Class". Caution then enlists the assistance of Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
), a programmer of Alpha 60 who is also the daughter of Prof. von Braun (although she says "I have never met him"). Natacha is a citizen of Alphaville, and when questioned says she does not know the meaning of "love" or "conscience". Caution falls in love with her, and his love introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city that the computer has crafted in its own image. Natacha discovers, with the help of Lemmy Caution, that she was actually born outside of Alphaville. (The city name is given as Nueva York -Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
for New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
instead of either the original English name or the French literal rendering "Nouvelle York").
Professor von Braun (the name taken from German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun
Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun was a German rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and in the United States after that.A former member of the Nazi party,...
) was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu (a tribute to F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu), but Caution is repeatedly told that Nosferatu no longer exists. The Professor himself talks infrequently, referring only vaguely to his hatred for journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville, even going so far as to offer him the opportunity to rule a galaxy. When he refuses Caution's enticement to go back to "the outlands", Caution kills him with a pistol shot.
Alpha 60 converses with Lemmy Caution several times throughout the film, and its voice is seemingly ever-present in the city, serving as a sort of narrator. Caution eventually destroys or incapacitates it by telling it a riddle that involves something Alpha 60 can not comprehend: poetry (although many of its lines are actually quotations from the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
; the opening line of the film, along with others, is an extract of Borges's essay "Forms of a Legend" and other references throughout the movie are made by Alpha 60 to Borges's "A New Refutation of Time
A New Refutation of Time
A New Refutation of Time is an essay by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in which he argues that the negations of idealism may be extended to time. It consists of a prologue and two articles: the first one was written in 1944 and appeared in number 115 of the review Sur; the second, written...
"). The concept of the individual self has been lost to the collectivized citizens of Alphaville, and this is the key to Caution's riddle.
At the end, as Paul Misraki
Paul Misraki
Paul Misraki was a French composer of popular music and film scores. Over the course of over 60 years, Misraki wrote the music to 130 films, scoring works by directors like Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Orson Welles, Luis...
's musical score reaches its crescendo, Natacha realizes that it is her understanding of herself as an individual with desires that saves her, and destroys Alpha 60. The film ends with her line, "Je vous aime" ("I love you").
Cast
- Eddie ConstantineEddie ConstantineEddie Constantine was an American-born French actor and singer who spent his career working in Europe....
– Lemmy Caution - Anna KarinaAnna KarinaAnna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
– Natacha von Braun - Akim TamirofAkim TamiroffAkim Mikhailovich Tamiroff was an Armenian actor. He won the first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.Tamiroff was born in Tiflis, Russian Empire , of Armenian ethnicity. He trained at the Moscow Art Theatre drama school. He arrived in the U.S. in 1923 on a tour with a troupe of actors...
– Henri Dickson - Christa Lang – 1st Seductress Third Class
- Valérie Boisgel – 2nd Seductress Third Class
- Jean-Louis ComolliJean-Louis ComolliJean-Louis Comolli is a French writer, editor, and film director. He was editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma from 1966 to 1978, during which period he wrote the influential essays "Machines of the Visible" and "Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field" , both of which have...
– Prof. Jeckell - Michel Delahaye – Prof. von Braun's assistant
- Jean-André Fieschi – Prof. Heckell
- Jean-Pierre LéaudJean-Pierre Léaud-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
– Breakfast-waiter - László SzabóLászló Szabó (actor)László Szabó is a Hungarian actor, film director and screenwriter. He has appeared in over 120 films since 1952, including seven films that have been screened at the Cannes Film Festival.-Selected filmography:* La poupée...
– Chief-engineer - Howard VernonHoward VernonHoward Vernon was a Swiss actor.Vernon was born Mario Lippert to a Swiss father and an American mother and was fluent in German, English, and French...
– Leonard Nosferatu, a.k.a. Professor von Braun
Production
Despite its futuristic scenario, Alphaville was filmed entirely in and around Paris and no special sets or props were constructed.Constantine came to the film through producer André Michelin, who had the actor under contract. Constantine had become a popular actor in France and Germany through his portrayal of tough-guy detective Lemmy Caution in a series of earlier films. Godard appropriated the character for Alphaville but according to director Anne Andreu Godard's subversion of the Lemmy Caution 'stereotype' effectively shattered Constantine's connection with the character—he was never again offered a Lemmy Caution role and reportedly said that he was shunned by producers after Alphaville was released.
The opening section of the film includes an unedited sequence that depicts Caution walking into his hotel, checking in, riding an elevator and being taken through various corridors to his room. According to cinematographer Raoul Coutard, he and Godard shot this section as a continuous four-minute take. Part of this sequence shows Caution riding an elevator up to his room, which was achieved thanks to the fact that the hotel used as the location had two glass-walled elevators side by side, allowing the camera operator to ride in one lift while filming Constantine riding the other car through the glass between the two. However, as Coutard recalled, this required multiple takes, since the elevators were old and in practice they proved very difficult to synchronize.
Like most of Godard's films, the performances and dialogue in Alphaville were substantially improvised. Assistant director Charles Bitsch recalled that, even when production commenced he had no idea what Godard was planning to do. Godard's first act was to ask Bitsch to write a screenplay, saying that producer Michelin had been pestering him for a script because he needed it to help him raise finance from backers in Germany (where Constantine was popular). Bitsch protested that he had never read a Lemmy Caution book, but Godard simply said "Read one and then write it." Bitsch read a Caution book, then wrote a 30-page treatment and brought it to Godard, who said "OK, fine" and took it without even looking at it. It was then given to Michelin, who was pleased with the result, and the 'script' was duly translated into German and sent off to the backers. In fact, none of it even reached the screen and according to Bitsch the German backers later asked Michelin to repay the money when they saw the completed film.
Influences
Jean CocteauJean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
was one of the artists who exerted significant influences on Godard's films, and parallels between Alphaville and Cocteau's 1950 film Orpheus are evident. For example, Orphée's search for Cégeste and Caution's for Harry Dickson, between the poems Orphée hears on the radio and the aphoristic questions given by Alpha 60, between Orphée's victory over Death through the recovery of his poetic powers and Caution's use of poetry to destroy Alpha 60. Moreover, Godard openly acknowledges his debt to Cocteau on several occasions. When Alpha 60 is destroyed, for instance, people stagger down labyrinthine corridors or cling blindly to the walls like the inhabitants of Cocteau's "Zone de la mort", and, at the end of the film, Caution tells Natasha not to look back, like Orphée did to Eurydice
Eurydice
Eurydice in Greek mythology, was an oak nymph or one of the daughters of Apollo . She was the wife of Orpheus, who loved her dearly; on their wedding day, he played joyful songs as his bride danced through the meadow. One day, a satyr saw and pursued Eurydice, who stepped on a venomous snake,...
.
The voice of Alpha 60, played by a man with a mechanical voice box
Mechanical larynx
A mechanical larynx, also referred to as a "throat back", is a medical device used to produce clearer speech by those who have lost their original voicebox, usually due to cancer of the larynx. The most common device is the electrolarynx which is handheld, battery operated and placed under the...
replacing his cancer-damaged
Cancer of the larynx
Laryngeal cancer may also be called cancer of the larynx or laryngeal carcinoma. Most laryngeal cancers are squamous cell carcinomas, reflecting their origin from the squamous cells which form the majority of the laryngeal epithelium....
larynx
Larynx
The larynx , commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the neck of amphibians, reptiles and mammals involved in breathing, sound production, and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. It manipulates pitch and volume...
, descends from the hypnotic power of Mabuse
Doctor Mabuse
Doctor Mabuse is a fictional character created by Norbert Jacques in the novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and made famous by the three movies director Fritz Lang made about the character; see Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. Although the character was designed deliberately to mimic pulp magazine-style...
's disembodied voice in the 1933 film The Testament of Dr Mabuse.
The film production company Alphaville Pictures
AlphaVille Pictures Copenhagen
AlphaVille Pictures Copenhagen is a film production company based in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was founded by director Christoffer Boe and producer Tine Grew Pfeiffer in 2003 and since then it has mainly released Boe's subsequent films...
, co-founded in 2003 by Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
director Christoffer Boe
Christoffer Boe
Christoffer Boe is a Danish film director and screenwriter. He is an established and well-known not only in Denmark, but all through the world. Among his international awards there are FIPRESCI Director of the Year at San Sebastián International Film Festival and Golden Camera at Cannes Film...
, is named after the film.
German synthpop
Synthpop
Synthpop is a genre of popular music that first became prominent in the 1980s, in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic art rock, disco and particularly the "Kraut rock" of...
band Alphaville
Alphaville (band)
Alphaville is a German synthpop group which gained popularity in the 1980s. The founding members were Marian Gold , Bernhard Lloyd , and Frank Mertens Alphaville is a German synthpop group which gained popularity in the 1980s. The founding members were Marian Gold (real name Hartwig Schierbaum,...
took their name from the film.
See also
- List of French language films
- ALPHA 60ALPHA 60ALPHA 60 is an alternative rock band from Uppsala, Sweden, formed in 2008. Their name is a reference to the 1965 noir classic Alphaville; Alpha 60 being the computer controlling Godard's dystopian city.-History:...
, Swedish alternative rockAlternative rockAlternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
band - The Sour NotesThe Sour NotesThe Sour Notes are an American independent rock band.Based in Austin, Texas, The Sour Notes consists of members Jared Boulanger, Chris Page, Amarah Ulghani, Elaine Greer & Andrew Stevens...
, who sampled passages from Paul ÉluardPaul ÉluardPaul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
's "Capitale de la Douleur" in the film, on the song "Your Pretty Sphinx Voice".
'Alphaville' - Track on Bryan Ferry's Olympia(2011) inspired by Film.