If you are a certain age, you probably have a film by Jean-Luc Godard that blew your mind when you first saw it. For me, that film was Godard’s low-budget venture into dystopian science fiction, “Alphaville.”
This film opened the 1965 New York Film Festival, which hailed it as the “first successful incursion of pop art into the cinema.” Now, “Alphaville” is returning in a restored, re-subtitled print at the IFC Center, starting Dec. 15.
“Alphaville” can be called pop art, meta-noir, sci-fi neorealism, or the underground precursor to the overblown, effects-driven superhero movies of the 21st century. The film became popular by appropriating an existing movie icon, the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution, played in seven French thrillers by the frog-faced American actor Eddie Constantine.
Thanks to Constantine, “Alphaville” is remarkably close to a “normal” movie (by Godardian standards). And thanks to Godard, Lemmy — one icon among many — lives in a self-aware movie universe. This realization came when, dispatched to find the German pulp character Harry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Lemmy asks him if their colleagues Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are dead.
“Alphaville” is pure pop in the form of gritty vérité. It was shot on high-speed, black-and-white film almost entirely at night and largely in the then-new Paris business district La Défense. The mayhem in the film is accentuated by Paul Misraki’s start-stop, hyper-melodramatic score, while tough-guy Lemmy quotes Paul Éluard.
Inventive and pragmatic, Godard transformed ordinary objects into futuristic gizmos: a jukebox stands for a spy console, a cigarette lighter receives radio transmissions, an electric fan denotes the supercomputer Alpha 60, and the computer’s flat, guttural croak is that of a man with a prosthetic voice box.
Godard was pragmatic in other ways. Richard Brody’s biography, “Everything Is Cinema,” suggests that “Alphaville” was designed to get Anna Karina, who divorced the director just before filming began, to say the words “I love you.” She does at the end of the film. Audiences were not impressed, Andrew Sarris “felt waves of hatred washing up on the screen.”
Bosley Crowther, a critic for The New York Times was also there and he noted that Godard’s “excessively cinematic prank” provoked annoyance when it became “a tedious tussle with intellectual banalities.”
Like “1984” and recent opinion pieces, “Alphaville” equates totalitarianism with the debasement of language and allegiance to the algorithm. To many, the film is a work of art. The conceptualist Mel Bochner celebrated “Alphaville” and MoMA PS1 hosted a show of contemporary art inspired by Godard called “Postcards From Alphaville.”
Those artworks have dated but the film hasn’t. Digitally restored, “Alphaville” not only looks but feels brand-new. The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.
Alphaville
Opens on Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com.