The strange adventure of Lemmy Caution – secret agent of the future.
Alphaville movie storyline. In a near future, the American secret agent Lemmy Caution travels to Alphaville posing as the journalist Ivan Johnson from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. His mission is to find the missing agent Henry Dickson and to convince Professor von Braun to come with him to Nueva York.
Prof. von Braun is actually Leonard Nosferatu and has created the powerful computer Alpha 60 that has conceived the inhuman dystopian society of Alphaville, where love, conscience, poetry and emotion have been banished and words are systematically eliminated from the dictionary. Alpha 60 is also omnipresent and Lemmy has the assistance of Natacha von Braun, who is the daughter of von Braun. Soon he falls in love with Natacha but he needs to complete his mission before leaving Alphaville.
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965 French New Wave science-fiction neo-noir film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.
Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special props or futuristic sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (that in 1965 were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city’s interiors. The film is set in the future but the characters also refer to twentieth-century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth-century setting and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.
About the Story
Lemmy Caution is a secret agent with the code number of 003 from “the Outlands”. Entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie,[3] he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson and claims to work for the Figaro-Pravda. Caution is on a series of missions. First, he searches for the missing agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff); second, he is to capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon); lastly, he aims to destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun, which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.
Alpha 60 has outlawed free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60’s dictates is that “people should not ask ‘why’, but only say ‘because'”. People who show signs of emotion are presumed to be acting illogically and are gathered up, interrogated, and executed. In an image reminiscent of George Orwell’s concept of Newspeak, there is a dictionary in every hotel room that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society.
Images of the E = mc2 and hf = mc2 equations are displayed several times throughout the film as symbols of the regime of logical science that rules Alphaville. At one point, Caution passes through a place called the Grand Omega Minus, from where brainwashed people are sent out to the other “galaxies” to start strikes, revolutions, family rows, and student revolts.
As an archetypal American anti-hero private eye in trenchcoat and with weathered visage, Lemmy Caution’s old-fashioned machismo conflicts with the puritanical computer (Godard originally wanted to title the film Tarzan versus IBM).[4] The opposition of his role to logic (and that of other dissidents to the regime) is represented by faux-quotations from Capitale de la douleur (“Capital of Pain”), a book of poems by Paul Éluard.
Caution meets Dickson, who soon dies in the process of making love to a “Seductress Third Class”. Caution then enlists the assistance of Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina), a programmer of Alpha 60 and daughter of Professor von Braun. Natacha is a citizen of Alphaville and when questioned, says that she does not know the meaning of “love” or “conscience”. Caution falls in love with her, and his love introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city. Natacha discovers, with the help of Lemmy Caution, that she was actually born outside of Alphaville. (The city name is given as Nueva York—Spanish for New York—instead of either the original English name or the French literal rendering “Nouvelle York”.)
Professor von Braun (the name is a reference to the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun[5]) was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu (a tribute to F. W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu), but Caution is repeatedly told that Nosferatu no longer exists. The Professor himself talks infrequently, referring only vaguely to his hatred for journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville, even going so far as to offer him the opportunity to rule a galaxy. When he refuses Caution’s offer to go back to “the outlands”, Caution kills him.
Alphaville (1965)
Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Howard Vernon, Valérie Boisgel, Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye, Christa Lang, Jean-Pierre Léaud, László Szabó
Screenplay by: Jean-Luc Godard
Production Design by: Pierre Guffroy
Cinematography by: Raoul Coutard
Film Editing by: Agnès Guillemot
Music by: Paul Misraki
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Athos Films
Release Date: May 5, 1965
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