Jean-Luc Godard’s pop Sci-fi masterpiece jumps to 4K … and the splendid 2023 remaster on the 4K disc finally nails Raoul Coutard’s gritty-beautiful B&W cinematography. Agent Lemmy Caution rockets through intersidereal space to fight the computer Alpha 60 in Dr. Nosferatu’s ‘Capital of Pain’ … and to help Natacha Von Braun re-learn the word ‘love.’ The pulp saga is the story of our times, circa 1965. Stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff.

Alphaville 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1965 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 99 min. / Street Date August 27, 2024 / Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution / available through Kino Lorber / 39.95
Starring: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Howard Vernon, Michael Delahaye, Christa Lang, Jean-Pierre Leaud.
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production Design: Pierre Guffroy
Film Editor: Agnès Guillemot
Original Music: Paul Misraki
Poems by Paul Éluard
Produced by André Michelin
Written and Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

We thought our prayers had been answered 5 years ago, with an announcment of a Blu-ray of one of Jean-Luc Godard’s most entertaining pictures. When we saw it, we admit being a tad disappointed — its appearance was a little soft and gray, lacking the hard ‘Ilford’ edge we remembered from old 35mm prints.

The review essay this time around is more or less the same, but the contents of the new Alphaville 4K ULTRA HD release are very different. We’re happy with the upgrade, and think most purchasers will be too. Owners of the 2019 disc will want to read more carefully before making up their minds.

Alphaville is the Jean-Luc Godard feature that is most like a conventional movie, with relatively few rude disruptions of narrative conventions, the kind of Godardisms that cause uninitiated audiences to shake their heads in surrender. Godard sticks with a firm narrative all the way through — it’s a genre mashup, essentially. His story not only has a beginning, a middle and an end, it allows us to identify with its characters and perhaps shed a tear at the conclusion.

 

In school we ‘read’ the adventure of tough guy Lemmy Caution as an ordinary satire on spy films, which shows how stunted our imaginations were. On his trip through the cultural supermarket, Godard pulled a number of discordant items off the shelves. None of the working elements in Alphaville is original, but Godard assembles them into a whole far bigger than their parts.

In his Ford Galaxie secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) travels across space to Alphaville, a mysterious technological super-city where all decisions are made by ‘Alpha 60,’ a super-computer with a croaking, unemotional voice. Posing as Figaro-Pravda reporter Ivan Johnson, Lemmy’s mission is to find his predecessor Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), and to either bring back or liquidate Professor Léonard Nosferatu, a defector who now ‘engineers’ Alphaville under the name von Braun (Howard Vernon, curiously unbilled). As a visitor from a région extérieure Lemmy is assigned a guide, von Braun’s daughter Natacha (Anna Karina). Alpha 60 considers all foreign lands enemy territory. Natacha explains the customs in this ‘Capital of Pain.’  Hotels offer prostitutes stamped with numbers, and words newly deemed obsolete by Alpha 60 are deleted. Hotel Bibles are really dictionaries, and they’re changed on a daily basis. Language is essential: by eliminating words, Alpha 60 is erasing the human meanings and emotions behind them.

Alphaville is preparing to attack the Exterior Countries because logic says they will one day invade. Lemmy locates Henri Dickson, now a broken man. The previous agents sent to subvert Alpha ville have all failed: Guy Leclair, and Dick Tracy.

Now on his own, Lemmy concentrates on evading Alpha 60’s secret police. He has two goals: to find and neutralize Prof. von Braun, and to redeem the lost soul Natacha. He reaches her through the power of poetry and the recovery of lost concepts, like love.

Alphaville was initially noted for filming a futuristic spy saga entirely in ordinary (but modern) Paris locations … like the best science fiction, the message is that The Future is already here. Lemmy crosses ‘intersidereal space’ just by driving on a freeway in his Mustang. Raoul’s Coutard’s B&W cinematography sees Alphaville mostly as a city of night. Visual clues offer mixed references to The Occupation, existential malaise and dystopian science fiction movies. An elevator button reading ‘SS’ takes us to a death chamber where poets and philosophers wait in line to be executed by synchronized swimmers.  →

And Godard and Gorin later embraced Maoism?  Go figure. 
All is definitely ‘out of orbit’ in the city Lemmy disses as ‘Zeroville.’ The sad city is overrun with agents in hats and trenchcoats, collecting citizens for interrogation. Like every citizen in Alpha 60’s totalitarian regime, Natacha has been dehumanized. She has no concept of the Past or of the Future or family relationships. She and has no knowledge of her father. Many things are reversed: people nod to say no and shake their heads to say yes. The state of free will is summed up in the fact that the word ‘why’ has been replaced with ‘because.’ Alpha 60 uses language as a weapon — Lemmy is at one point disarmed by a verbal joke.

Is this the first Sci-fi picture with a sentient supercomputer that wants to rule the world?  Menacing computers surely existed before, but within half a year after this particular cultural flashpoint, the concept had become a Sci-fi cliché. Godard gives Alpha 60 a brilliant touch — the computer is voiced by a man with no vocal chords, who has learned to talk ‘from his diaphragm.’  Godard called it a ‘killed’ voice. The ugly noise sounds like vocalized belching.

 

The Lemmy Caution character originated from the pen of British writer Peter Cheyney; American expatriate singer and actor Eddie Constantine played him at least six times previous to this movie. Jean-Luc Godard redefined Lemmy, making him more of a humorless killer with a mission. In terms of costume and behavior, Godard may have modeled ‘his’ Lemmy after Robert Stack’s hard-case avenger in Sam Fuller’s  House of Bamboo. Lemmy’s actions are reduced to blunt-force bursts of cartoon violence, studded with comic-book one-liners:

“Not bad for a veteran of Guadalcanal.”

“Do you know that Reporter and Revenger begin with the same letter?”

 
The beauty of the concept is that for all his Mike Hammer- like brutality, Lemmy is a defender of human values, defined repeatedly as language and poetry. His main weapon against Alpha 60 is words, specifically an irrational Riddle of the Sphinx that only a flawed human will accept. This gimmick for short-circuiting evil computers was copied and repeated ad infinitum in so-called ‘thinking man’s’ Sci-fi of the 1960s, especially The Prisoner and Star Trek.

Godard does play some of his cinematic graffiti games. Instead of agit-prop inter-titles, the language-obsessed director’s text messages show up in standard signage, neon displays, and even a lecturer’s slide show. Non-sequitur cutaways to flashing lights and neon displays serve as punctuation, and transitional material. Several of Godard’s handwritten cartoon-scribbles crop up; they feature little word-puns in French. More word jokes arrive with name-drops of other ‘exterior land’ city-states in space — Nueva York, Pekingville, Angoulême City, Tokyorama. I suppose that New York is now primarily hispanic. If the word Angoulême was chosen because it sounds like the French word ‘ange,’ then ‘Angoulême City’ might be Los Angeles.

 

This is one of Godard’s most accessible movies. He seems less committed to disorienting effects for their own sake. He once used jump-cuts to cover pauses where he fed dialogue lines to his actors; here he favors unbroken tracking shots. Godard is no longer intent on reminding us that we’re watching an artificial construction: the audio drops to silence now and then, but tracks don’t pop in and out at random. The show’s sense of humor is mostly conventional as well. Eddie Constantine’s deadpan behavior is wonderfully funny in its own way. Godard doesn’t shut us out. We don’t get the feeling that he is laughing up his sleeve at the audience.

Godard was a provocateur, but certainly not a liberal feminist. Although we see a female security guard with an M-1, most women in this dystopia are courtesans, including one whose job appears to be serving as a nude statue. These sexist roles are no different than the ‘pleasure units’ of the first  Derek Flint movie. Lemmy examines the numbers tattooed on the comfort hostesses’ arms, legs, neck and even faces. His reaction is mostly annoyance. He routinely slaps women around in approved Mickey Spillane fashion, even Natacha.

Viewers that can penetrate Godard’s style may enjoy the film’s ‘raw’ B&W look. Raoul Coutard filmed the show in constant protest, as Godard barely allowed him to use any lights. Without today’s sensitive film stocks night shoots in 1965 required artificial lighting. Godard found an English film stock manufactured by Ilford that could be ‘cheated’ to produce an extremely high ASA. Some takes came back all black anyway, as Coutard had been warned they might. But the show has a remarkable look — in most night scenes we can see much more than we expect. Any on-screen light source comes out as a bright item with a halo. One of the first shots shows Lemmy lighting a cigarette in his car, and the tiny flame lights up his pockmarked face.

Coutard pretty much conquers those technical difficulties. Only two shots appear to have needed rescue by the lab, a pair of dark and grainy close-ups of Lemmy in his final scene with von Braun. Elsewhere Coutard’s camerawork is masterful, as when he hand-holds a take that follows Lemmy and a house prostitute up an elevator and all the way to his hotel room… it almost seems a reference to the lobby-and-elevator achievement in Murnau’s  The Last Laugh.

Godard claimed that the movie was about light: ‘bringing light to darkness?’  In one scene, an agent of Alpha 60 switches on a line of fluorescent lights, and ‘proclaims the dawn.’ Contrasting close-ups stress Karina’s beauty and Constantine’s craggy face. One purely poetic sequence uses shots that rack through the exposure spectrum, from almost black to almost white. The poem itself alludes to Song of Songs and more than suffices to represent the life-affirming rebirth of Natacha’s soul:

 

“Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips…”“If you smile, it enfolds me all the better. The rays of your arms pierce the mist.” 
Embracing all of this is Paul Misraki’s music score, which alternates between overstated ‘Danger!’ and ‘Tension!’ stings, and more delicate motifs that create a detached sense of genre glory. Romantic cues include a waltz and a emotional love theme. The mostly conventional music confirms Alphaville as something apart from a Godardian culture-critique.

In its basics Alphaville is a standard super-spy yarn. A Lone Wolf agent travels to a hostile location, neutralizes a malign technological conspiracy and escorts ‘the girl’ to safety. That is the central motif of much of James Bond starting with  Dr. No.  In each case a legendary hero staves off an element of malevolent futurism. Godard’s wrinkle posits a new kind of adventure for its Galahad-like private eye. One of his alternate titles for Alphaville was said to be ‘Tarzan vs. I.B.M..’  Alpha 60’s Bible is a dictionary, but a genuine Biblical allusion is saved for the finish: “Don’t look back.”

The characters are self-conscious pulp constructs, yet Anna Karina’s endearing princess is possessed of a sad, longing soul. Akim Tamiroff’s Henri Dickson really seems taken with Christa Lang’s thieving good time girl. A secret agent gone to seed, Dickson has been brought low by the vices in Alphaville’s forbidden-zone underworld. We’re told that various Godard friends and film critics play Alphaville’s lab-coated engineers. The art-film distortion of Eddie Constantine’s signature role had an effect opposite to what the actor wanted — his star power was diminished, not enhanced.

Richard Brody’s book  Cinema Is Everything The Working Life of of Jean-Luc Godard is packed with insights on Alphaville. The show came about when a half-serious plan to film  Bonnie & Clyde fell through; Godard would later develop his own lovers-on-the-run story, Pierrot Le Fou. The director had by this time broken up with his main muse Anna Karina. The show is one of several in which he addresses the relationship directly, perceiving the problem as being HER failure to love him.

According to Brody, Godard quotes freely from poet Paul Éluard but lifts ideas and text from a Sci-fi book by an author named George Bernanos, ‘France Against the Robots.’  The surprisingly conservative Godard ranted and railed against film crews that wouldn’t work all night without extra pay, as per labor laws. Brody quotes Raoul Coutard as being fed up with Godard’s attitude that everyone was against him: “He’d like to swallow the film and process it out his ass — that way he wouldn’t need anyone.”

 

Fellow film student Steven Nielson straightened me out when I (back then) called the filming haphazard and amateurish. I was then able to screen a 35mm print of Alphaville at a Sci-fi film series I ran at UCLA in 1975. It was stunning. The valuable lesson: don’t judge movies through the filter of Hollywood values.

Some audiences for Alphaville responded to the movie mostly as a comedy. They laughed when Godard cut between positive and negative images. Now I wonder if the effect is meant to be ‘Nosferatu-vision,’ seeing as how F.W Murnau used negative images. Also received as hilarious was Lemmy’s big ‘kung fu fight,’ represented by a series of shot of Lemmy and a thug standing in action poses, as if for a stills man. Godard had already used the gag in  A Woman Is a Woman, to create Donen & Kelly-style musical sequences — without all that troublesome dancing and choreography.

But Godard’s movie ultimately feels profound. Its re-assemblage of pulp notions emerges as something transcendant. Near the end, Alpha 60 has a nervous breakdown. The city’s lights go berserk, imitating the mass power outage in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Deprived of the computer’s guidance, the denizens of Alphaville now stagger about disoriented and delirious, like zombies, robots or pod people. Lemmy must physically carry Natacha from the Lion’s Den. As in a Greek Myth, Natacha can’t find the way out until Lemmy tells her to think of the word ‘love.’ She responds like a trouper: the exit is thataway. Human language once again pierces the darkness: more cheering for the wedding of pulp and poetry.

We’re told that Eddie Constantine played Lemmy Caution again for Godard, in the 1991 film Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro. It’s described as a philosophical inquiry about Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

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The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Alphaville 4K is a 2023 4K remaster that pretty much blows away Kino’s own 2019 disc, also billed as being from a 4K scan. We judged the old disc as better than acceptable, but this encoding faithfully replicates the old 35mm release prints, which had a very particular appearance. An added Restoration Text Card says that the original camera negative (OCN) was sourced for the new remaster, and that Raoul Coutard used three different film stocks, Ilford, Agfa and Eastman.

The first thing we notice is an improved stability. The opening titles don’t jitter in the frame. The scan is more sensitive to Coutard’s mix of low- and high- contrast scenes. The greater range of contrast renews their natural look — sharp and detailed, with 4K’s heightened contrast sensitivity. Dull and darker parts of the frame — often faces! — now yield better definition.

Coutard and Godard’s more stylized images are improved as well. Of special note is the ‘love poem’ sequence, which does tricks with over- and under-exposure. The previous master muffed these entirely — now they properly accompany the poetry. Besides the added image stability, dirt and occasional cinch marks are gone. The final highway shot still jumps up and down like amateur work — it’s supposed to look like that.

We are very pleased because getting the B&W ‘look’ right makes a big difference. We have only one caveat warning for purchasers. If you have the previous Blu-ray, are 4K capable and really like the movie, getting the 4K should be a good thing. But if you are not yet 4K equipped, you need to know that the Blu-ray included in the new package is identical to the older Blu-ray — it does not appear to be from the new restoration. So if you want to see the new restoration and only have a Blu-ray player, you may be disappointed.

 

The extras have not changed. Two video items are each run under six minutes. Colin McCabe is on camera for a generalized introduction, and the late Anna Karina offers a personal memory that is more than a bit rambling. An original trailer in pretty good shape almost sells the show as a standard action picture … almost. We’re given a choice of soundtracks. The English dub is here. We language snobs ignore it.

Tim Lucas’s feature commentary casts a wide net over filmic, art and cultural references, from Dante’s Beatrice to the Instamatic camera. When he explains who Dick Tracy, Guy Leclair and Henri Dickson were, I have to remind myself that the world of 1965 is likely foreign territory for much of today’s audience… that don’t watch Blu-rays, or even B&W movies. Lucas rolls out the filmic connections and a full Eddie Constantine biography. He also relates anecdotes offered by actress Christa Lang, who is still a busy online presence, happily promoting the legacy of her late husband, director Samuel Fuller.

My information may be out of date regarding the voice of Alpha 60, for Tim cites another origin. He helpfully points out the new transfer’s rather faulty subtitles — they frequently skip over what is actually being said, missing references to things like ‘pointed teeth reminiscent of vampire films we once watched at the old Cinerama theaters.’ I realize that many of the joke lines in the original English subs were rewritten and simplified as well. I’ll never forget Lemmy’s line when he plugs a hated enemy, as related in an apparently inaccurate original film subtitle: “Let that be a lesson for all despots that take aggression as their personal hobby horse.” Or something to that effect. But the ‘cool’ awkwardness was warmly received in my film school screenings.

The subs here are just ignorant, and destructive. ‘Tokyorama’ is listed as plain ‘Tokyo,’ and Angoulême City is just ‘Angoulême.’ I’ve seen the show so often that I’ve taken to watching it without subs … and instead listen to the French dialogue more closely.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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Alphaville 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Tim Lucas
Anna Karina interview
Colin MacCabe introduction
trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and one Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 8, 2024
(7177alph)

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