Says Johnson at the beginning of the film, that ‘sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication.’ Not a big revelation, but coming from the pen of the same man who said that cinema is reality twenty-four frames a second, it evokes an interesting syllogism. Despite the insightful wordiness of its script, there is something in Alphaville that only flourishes through its images, its sounds, the voices of its characters and the expressions on their faces. A sense of worry, confusion, appal, resistance comes from Johnson’s firm and piercing stare as Natasha’s serene numbness progressively crumbles, to her own anguished surprise—that of one who opens her eyes after a long sleep and slowly adapts to the blinding light. Alphaville is made of a mutable matter that fleets the words and defies the scholastic clichés of the genres it combines. ‘That’s always how it is. You never understand anything and in the end, it kills you.’
The distorted world sketched by Godard is not driven by an enclave greedy for money or power. It is governed by logic as opposed to creativity. This alone gives me twice the creeps. In the first place, because it plants the conflict even deeper inside our nature. And then, living in an age gone nuts with all things AI, because it rings acid and loud as a menacing warning. In Godard’s provocative view, man is letting his own intelligence destroy him. Not only, he is enjoying the process, even suggesting a form of rational masochism that, again, can’t but resonate with some of the aberrations of our contemporaneity. Words become extinct, so do ideas. ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum,’1 says Noam Chomsky. Silence Logique Sécurité Prudence, is written in unfriendly-looking capitols on a city sign of Alphaville.
The noir soul of the film is no less fascinating. Traditional noirs, however zigzagging through various complications, tend to follow a clear thread—we might get deceived but at least we have a sense of what is at stake. In Alphaville, what is really behind its palpably dangerous atmosphere is deliberately kept foggy. Who is the laconic Johnson, we wonder. ‘What do you do for a living?’ inquires Natasha. ‘I work.’ If not a journalist, is he a spy? But to investigate what, exactly, and on behalf of whom. He is allowed to take photos, he is welcomed to the futuristic Alpha 60 headquarters where he is friendly lectured on its functioning and civilly confronted by the elusive Professor von Braun. And yet thugs are sent to kill him. Logic reigns, not muscles, I should remember, but the balance is unstable—or perhaps, after all, just human.
Many of the questions that Alphaville rises are bound to stay unanswered. In many ways, Godard sets a relationship between the film and the audience that echoes the attraction between Johnson and the beautiful, vulnerable, inscrutable Natasha. And much like him, we won’t escape falling in love with the mystery and the enchanting fragility of being. Je. Vous. Aime. Je vous aime.
