Prologue: "Reality is too complex, so you make it fiction to make it comprehensible." What this fiction is about, according to its tentative original title, is "Tarzan vs. IBM." Godard takes his hero from the public domain, the pulp domain — Lemmy Caution, a sort of Gallic Mike Hammer — and sends him into the indefinite future, to an unspecific planet, travelling by way of a Ford Galaxy. (Contemporary Paris, unaltered, stands in for the city of the future, but in Raoul Coutard's imagery it becomes a sinister place of impenetrable pitch-blackness and glaring fluorescence. Some of the images reveal a terrific camera eye: a view streetward through the façade of a building, for instance, is a mishmash of contrasting architectural lines — an overlap of curlicue ironwork and straight-edged neon.) Godard, however, has infused his trench-coated Ape Man with a couple of alternate identities, which flick on and off as easily as electric lights. Caution is an explorer-ethnographer of an alien culture, taking pocket-camera snapshots everywhere he goes; and he is also an aloof critic-connoisseur of his own he-man mystique, tossing off occasional highbrow comments on the hard-boiled action genre. Taken altogether, Alphaville is not a great deal more comprehensible than reality. With Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff. (1964) — Duncan Shepherd
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