\u201cAlphaville\u201d was both a complete revelation and yet not so vaguely familiar.<\/p>\n
This exotic product of the French new wave washed across the shores of my youthful consciousness, mingling the familiar with the new, pulp fiction, pop culture and high art, suggesting multiple ways to recombine film DNA. One of the most important examples of genre cross-pollination in modern cinema, Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201cAlphaville\u201d (1965) merged film-noir and science-fiction tropes long before Ridley Scott\u2019s \u201cBlade Runner.\u201d In fact, Scott \u00adacknowledges \u201cAlpha\u00adville\u201d in \u201cBlade Runner,\u201d and surely the Seductress Third Class in \u201cAlphaville\u201d is a fore\u00adrunner of Pris, the Basic Pleasure Model.<\/p>\n
In addition to mixing genres, Godard recruited secret agent Lemmy Caution, an existing B-movie character made famous in 1950s France by American-\u00adborn expatriate actor and Paris cabaret singer Eddie Constantine. More Mike Hammer than Philip Marlowe, the trenchcoat-clad Caution was another exotic, bi-continental hybrid.<\/p>\n
The craggy-faced Constantine, once a lover and collaborator of Edith Piaf, had been playing the character, created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney, in such films as \u201cThis Man Is Dangerous\u201d since 1953. Constantine would make his final appearance as Caution in Godard\u2019s \u201cGermany Year 90 Nine Zero\u201d (1991).<\/p>\n
The \u201cAlphaville\u201d plot also borrows liberally from George Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984,\u201d pitting Caution, who infiltrates the future city of Alphaville (the film was shot in Paris) undercover as a journalist, against the evil Leonard Nosferatu aka Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon). Any resemblance to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun is not accidental.<\/p>\n
Godard\u2019s evocation of German expressionism also reveals a debt to Fritz Lang\u2019s science-fiction (and place-named) landmark \u201cMetropolis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vernon\u2019s von Braun is the creator of the Alpha 60 sentient computer, the \u00admachine that rules Alphaville and has outlawed individualism, free thought, love, poetry and emotion. The Alpha 60, a clear forerunner of HAL in Stanley \u00adKubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d \u201cspeaks\u201d with the mechanical voice of a man whose larynx has been removed.<\/p>\n
Like Harrison Ford\u2019s Rick Deckard in \u201cBlade Runner,\u201d Caution falls in love with the film\u2019s \u00adfuturistic femme fatale, von Braun\u2019s curious and curiously robotic daughter Natacha (Anna Karina).<\/p>\n
Instead of singing \u201cDaisy\u201d\u00ad as its circuits are disconnected, the Alpha 60 goes nuts, along with the inhabitants, after Caution argues with it and quotes poetry to it. But not even Kubrick might have conceived of Alphaville executions accompanied by synchronized swimmers.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlphaville\u201d \u2014 which preceded the publication of Philip K. Dick\u2019s \u201cDo \u00adAndroids Dream of Electric Sheep?\u201d \u2014 is like a fiction film version of one of \u00adGodard\u2019s nonfiction meditations on history and the cinema. But in this case, it was a cinematic meditation upon the \u201chistory\u201d of the future.