Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (47 page)

Lemmy accompanies Natasha to a “gala” (on the way they step into an elevator showing a button for the “SS” floor—a gag based on the French word “sous-sol,” or basement), where he learns that in Alphaville, those who weep are executed. The “gala” is an evening of public executions, by firing squad, of people standing on the edge of a diving board and falling
into the water, where they are retrieved—and then also stabbed to death—by gracefully diving women bearing daggers slipped in the side of their bikini bottoms.
²⁹
Lemmy is told by a pair of officials that “generally there are fifty men to every woman executed,” and that their crime was “illogical behavior.”

With the tattooed numbers, the SS floor, the character von Braun (who is also Professor Nosferatu), and a plethora of visual references to German films of the 1920s, Godard repeats the analogy asserted in
A Married Woman:
that the emotional failures of the modern world are akin to its failures of historical memory, that the modern world of technology, order, and comfort is regimented like a concentration camp, and that the inability to be true to the dictates of one’s conscience in love is a moral failing at the level of collaboration with a Nazi-like power. The private failure of love—Anna Karina’s failure to love Godard—is both the result of a plot almost cosmic in its malevolent dimensions, and the sign of complicity, albeit unwilling and unwitting, with an evil force.

Lemmy Caution, under interrogation by Alpha 60 (for which Godard put Constantine in a glassed-in radio broadcast booth as microphones glide around his head, while a table fan lit from below silently whirs to sudden starts and stops), gives a perfect exposition of the film’s aesthetic politics:

A
LPHA 60
: What transforms night into day?
C
AUTION:
Poetry.
A
LPHA 60:
What is your religion?
C
AUTION:
I believe in the immediate givens of my conscience.

Lemmy’s answers are a clear statement of Godard’s own aesthetic politics. Poetry is the light that the modern world is lacking, and conscience has the sacred status of faith and transcendent moral law. The book of poetry Henri Dickson gives to Lemmy Caution, Eluard’s
The Capital of Pain
, was chosen by Godard in part because its title stood for Alphaville itself. But as significantly, Eluard wrote and compiled the book in the early 1920s during the agony of his jealousy over his wife Gala’s affair with the artist Max Ernst, and the poems relate to that particular pain.
³⁰
The uses to which the book is put in the film—as the prop that Dickson passes to Lemmy and that Lemmy uses to teach Natasha about love, it becomes the film’s MacGuffin—make manifest the parallel between the creations of the two poets, Eluard and Godard.

By means of the poetry Lemmy has given her, Natasha is able to understand the word “conscience,” even though it does not appear in the Alphaville
“Bible,” the dictionary. He helps her to recover from the depths of her unconscious the memory of her roots: she realizes that she is originally from “Nueva York, where in winter, Broadway sparkles under snow as soft and as gentle as mink.” Most crucially, when Natasha asks Lemmy the fateful question—“Love: what is it?”—Godard answers the question himself, cutting to an extraordinarily intimate close-up of Anna Karina, her face illuminated by velvety indirect sunlight, as she is saying and doing nothing, looking distractedly off-camera, almost out of character. It is a brief shot of breathtaking beauty that shows what love is: the emotion, on the part of a filmmaker, that gives rise to such an image.

Soon thereafter, Lemmy is captured by the evil mastermind von Braun/Nosferatu, who warns him of the fate that awaits him as a “romantic individualist”: “You will suffer something worse than death: you will become a legend.” Lemmy guns him down and escapes. After an antic chase, Lemmy and Natasha leave Alphaville together, with Lemmy at the wheel of his “Ford Galaxie” (actually a Mustang, though Godard himself owned a Galaxie). He warns her not to turn around—a command invoking less the myth of Orpheus than the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Natasha slowly extracts from herself the three words: “I,” “love,” “you,” and then links them together as a sentence, accompanied on the sound track by the soaring violins of conventionally romantic movie music.

In the world of Alphaville, poetry and love are illogical. The leap of faith called love flies in the face of all logic. As Lemmy has learned, in Alphaville fifty times more men are condemned to death for behaving illogically than women—men are fifty times likelier to fall in love than are women. Godard suggests that if women are so susceptible to persuasion against love—whether, like Charlotte in
A Married Woman
, by the industry of pleasure, or, like Natasha in
Alphaville
, by the regime of self-interest—it is because of their chilly natural affinity for inhuman logic, the Aristotelian “A is A,” which, for Godard, is “a woman is a woman.” For Godard, only a foolishly romantic man would, with his illogic, his poetry, and his heroism, seek to liberate a ruthlessly logical yet misguided woman, to call her to his impractical and unreasonable—but sublime, poetic, and artistic—faith in love. Only such a man would seek, through love, to arouse her conscience and awaken her consciousness. In
Alphaville
, the light of love is the light of enlightenment, depicted as a form of natural light that breaks through the fluorescent confinement of the technological tyranny.

As Lemmy and Natasha speed away from the nightmarish city, they leave the labyrinth of symbols behind and head into the reality of love—and into a brief but unmistakable scene of naturalistic, melodramatic representation. A romantic dream,
Alphaville
is also the end of romantic dreams in the hope of
a couple’s ordinary reality. As a genre pastiche,
Alphaville
is a clever but minor exercise in style, although its title remains an enduring catchword for heartless techno-dystopia. But it is as complex and moving an avowal of Godard’s artistic, philosophical, and personal conflicts and contradictions as any he had yet offered.

I
N
F
RANCE, THE
critical response to
Alphaville
was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Godard still had his inveterate detractors, both in the popular press of the right (such as
Le Figaro
) and in the specialized press of the left (for instance,
Les Temps Modernes
, where Arlette Elkaïm, the young lover whom Jean-Paul Sartre was in the process of adopting, gave Godard a schoolmarmish scolding: “It is true. The housing projects are sad and, in the evening, the people in the métro seem gloomy or dazed. But the computers have little to do with it”). The acceptance of Godard as an intellectual and cultural force—a process that had begun with
A Married Woman
—was itself a part of
Alphaville
’s reception (as, for instance, Anne Andreu noted in
Paris-Presse
, “the press has unanimously surrendered”).
³¹
In an interview, Godard offered a pair of matched explanations for the film’s wide acceptance:

With
Alphaville
, people have the feeling that for the first time I mastered the subject [of the film]. There’s an introduction, a development, a conclusion. I did my homework well.… I give people the impression of finally taking on big problems.
Alphaville
expresses ideas that are in the air. Let’s say, ones that are to the taste of the day. I have, to some extent, cleared my name.
³²

With
Alphaville
attracting more than 150,000 French spectators by the end of 1965,
³³
Godard had again achieved both commercial and critical success. (Though this was no help to Eddie Constantine, who said, “After
Alphaville
, there was total silence, nobody asked me to shoot films anymore.”)
³⁴
As nasty as the criticism by some of his opponents may have been, it could not touch him now: Godard had become a legend. He had, in the process, lost his wife and his faith in the cinema. If he did not “suffer something worse than death,” he nonetheless suffered, and would now go on to stage that suffering in a series of cinematic self-scourgings.

A
T THE THIRD
New York Film Festival, held in September 1965, three Godard films were on view:
Le Petit Soldat, Montparnasse and Levallois
(included in
Paris vu par…
), and
Alphaville
, which was shown at the opening night gala benefit for the New York Civil Liberties Union, tickets for which were being sold for $12.50 and $17.50 (when normal prices were $2
and $4). The festival’s programming was more audacious than ever: it was a true feast of modern cinema, featuring Carl Theodor Dreyer’s
Gertrud
, two films by Jerzy Skolimowski, Luchino Visconti’s
Sandra
, and Jean-Marie Straub’s first feature film,
Not Reconciled
, along with such important rediscoveries as the five hours of Louis Feuillade’s serial
The Vampires
, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1953 film
The Lady Without Camellias
, and Erich von Stroheim’s
The Wedding March
.

Like most of the shows at the festival, the gala screening of
Alphaville
sold out. It was an event at which to see and be seen (the downtown-style patrons who bought the few non-gala tickets got to watch the post-screening reception through a glass wall). The reviews set a new and respectful tone. As in France, the essential story in New York was of Godard’s canonization. Although several major reviews of
Alphaville
were reserved and baffled, Godard was now a recognized value of the modern art world, and the film was received as an important aesthetic event, essentially beyond the reach of criticism. The festival’s success and enduring significance were due to its appeal to youth; as Robert Mazzocco wrote in the
New York Review of Books
, Godard is “completely infatuated with films and with film-making,” and “imparts that infatuation to us—or at least, to the young.”
³⁵
According to the decidedly uninfatuated Mazzocco,
Alphaville
provoked controversy, but “no one, I think, doubted whether it was art.”
The New Yorker
’s Talk of the Town section presented the film’s screening as a deadpan carnival of bohemian youth being served, and reported on Godard’s own appearance, ideas, and attitude as a fact of culture that transcended the importance of any single film.
³⁶
Indeed, the reception of Godard’s films became the subject of meta-criticism in which critics critiqued each other’s critiques of Godard and his films. Jonas Mekas wrote in the
Village Voice
,

Kael dislikes Godard… The press attacked Godard for “Alphaville.” The members of the press conference and the symposiums attacked Godard. I never thought I would have to come to the defence [
sic
] of Godard. I thought Godard had enough friends. But even Andrew Sarris (who remains Godard’s best defender) declared that he thought Godard was (in his last two films) on the wrong track and that he is beginning to detect something ominous about Godard.

Mekas then countered with prophetic vehemence, “Godard is saying: Go to hell. Everything is possible,” and explained the hostility that his films had aroused: “Godard is ominous. Like any stark truth is ominous. Truth destroys untruth. Poets are ominous, sometimes.”
³⁷
Mazzocco reported that Pauline Kael had called
Alphaville
a “deadend.” Though she may not have
meant it as a compliment, she was, in a certain way, right: in making
Alphaville
, Godard had indeed come to the end of a certain road—the road of movies reminiscent of those made within the mainstream of the industry. Sarris was correct about finding something “ominous” in Godard’s most recent work: by the time
Alphaville
was shown in New York in September 1965, Godard had driven past the end of the road and was venturing dangerously far into a cinematic wilderness.

twelve.

PIERROT LE FOU

“Silence! I’m writing!”

G
ODARD’S NEXT FILM
,
P
IERROT LE FOU
(C
RAZY PETE
), brought his devotion to classical cinematic forms and moods to a spectacular end, and began a set of works marked by a hysterical, self-flagellating despair. In film after film, Godard’s frustrated loves and cinematic uncertainties would play out as self-damaging fantasies and petulant conflagrations of violence. With the end of his marriage to Anna Karina came the end of his quest for a form in which to represent and reinforce it; his new formless way of filmmaking mirrored a frantic state of mind that left no illusion of balance, finish, or grace.

Pierrot le fou
is based on a novel,
Obsession
, by Lionel White (translated as
Le Démon de onze heures
). Godard described it in February 1964 as being about “a guy who leaves his family to follow a girl much younger than he is. She is in cahoots with slightly shady people and it leads to a series of adventures.” Asked who would play the girl, Godard responded:

That depends on the age of the man. If I have, as I would like, Richard Burton, I will take my wife, Anna Karina. We would shoot the film in English. If I don’t have Burton and I take Michel Piccoli, I could no longer have Anna as an actress, they would form a too “normal” couple. In that case, I would need a very young girl. I’m thinking of Sylvie Vartan.
¹