Rating of
4/4
Alphaville & Hitler's Barcoded Moustache!
Filmhaus - wrote on 04/15/21
Semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation) was my bread and butter in college as a Visual Communications & Design Major.
I discovered early on that people are wired to connect meaning between images shown side by side, regardless of whether they mean to or not. An example of this was when I turned Hitler's moustache into a barcode for an art project, and my professor gave me an "A."
But I'd have been hard-pressed to tell you what it meant.
One person might have come the conclusion I meant to imply demagogues are a product of social commercialism, while another might have thought I was making a statement about the quantification of the natural world into numbers as form of fascist oppression.
However, the truth was much simpler.
For me, juxtaposing evocative images was an easy way to get noticed, and people like to discover meaning for themselves.
Given that my college work was under constant scrutiny by colleagues and professors, the critical process was more pleasant when the audience could draw a myriad of connections through broad inference .
If you assume the same of Goddard, it's an easier interpretation of the experience as the visual motif in his movies tie heavily into how we experience their meaning, and often times the visuals supercede the meaning of the words.
For instance, in Alphaville, it's not a good idea to try to make sense of the plot.
The main character, Lemmy Caution, is a secret agent on mission to search for a missing colleague, capture the creator of Alphaville, and destroy the dictatorial computer at the center of it all. All while loving a slave of the state into autonomous thought, alluding the police force, and befuddling interrogators with artsy riddles.
Needless to say, any commercial film whose focus on was on accessibility would find it difficult to pull off all of these plot threads and maintain narrative cohesion.
However, Goddard doesn't even make an attempt.
We see the protagonist interact with one group of characters in a setting, and then cut to completely different scenes without re-visiting past plot threads. The dialogue between characters and settings happens ad-hoc to propel the story forward, as opposed to any foreshadowing being employed. It's also well-known that a good majority of the dialogue was unscripted (and even the book adaptation was basically a transcription of the cast's improvisations).
That's why the images of what we see are what ultimately create meaning for the film.
To that end, here are some of the images I remember:
- Cold, beautiful women with barcodes on their necks
- Jagged lighting bouncing off strangely shaped alleyways and staircases
- A dictionary acting as a Bible
- Subliminal cut shots of a neon-lit "E=MC2" shown at random intervals
- A dying man in the throughs of ecstasy on a filthy mattress
- 360 degree shots of rows of supercomputers in dimly lit rooms
- A gurgle-drenched stoma voice box sound booth interrogation
- Poetry as reverse brain-washing
- A series of bizarre, surrealistic photos with narration about the irrelevance of cognition
- A man's flashlight punctuating the intense darkness of a room filled with impassive acolytes
- A nude woman in a cage
- Men on diving boards being shot for their sins of expressing emotion
- Towering skyscrapers looming like giant circuit boards over a bustling city
- Expressionistic, spastic arm movements of cognitively-blinded men
- Two lovers' motionless faces sitting next to slowly strobed lighting
Couple that with additional tropes of early noir & sci-fi movies on a $22,000 budget (this movie looks better than it has any right to), and you get an idea of the emotion the film visually evokes.
But what does any of it mean?
Is it Orwellian commentary on the freedom of expression? A genre-blended rumination on a dystopian future (sci-fi) held captive by sordid secrets (noir)? The power of love to induce autonomous will? All or none of the above?
After looking at the extras with the Kino Lorber release, I listened to a very erudite film critic tell me about the myriad of allusions, symbols, motif, and themes I could pull from this movie as I watched it.
But I came to a better conclusion; I was going to give Goddard the freedom to express himself personally without demanding any accountability to quantify the meaning behind his images.
And maybe that's the point of the movie.
