ALPHAVILLE

(vt Une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution)

   Pathe-contemporary/Chaumiane-Film Studio. Dir Jean-Luc Godard, starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon, Akim Tamiroff. Screenplay Godard. 100 mins. B/w.

   In this archetypal French New Wave film, intergalactic secret agent Lemmy Caution (Constantine) arrives at the planet Alphaville to deal with Alpha 60, the computer used to impose conformity on the inhabitants. He succeeds, meeting the computer's logic with his own illogic, and at the same time wins the affections of the ruler's daughter (Karina). A typical pulp-sf plot is transformed into an allegory of feeling versus technology, the past versus the present: Alphaville itself is an undisguised (but selectively seen) Paris of the 1960s; Caution (a tough guy from the 1940s, hero of many novels by UK thriller writer Peter Cheyney 1896-1951) does not use a spaceship to get there, but simply drives his own Ford car through intersidereal space - an ordinary road. A is filmed in high contrast, deep shadows and glaring light. It is a not always accessible maze of allusions culled from a wide variety of sources: semantic theory, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hollywood B-movies, comic books and pulp sf. The latter, like the other components of A, is used by Godard as a means of playfully imaging philosophical debate.

   See also: CINEMA.