Alphaville Essay

Godard called Alphaville ‘ a film about light. Lemmy is a character who brings light to people who no longer know what that is.’ (Godard,cited in Brody,2008,p229). The first image we are shown is that of a bright flashing light.It opens the film with a hypnotic flicker, its intensity unsettling. It reappears as a car’s headlight, then becomes the car’s indicator signalling a left turn. Later on it’s a light bulb swinging back and forth, the flash of Caution’s instamatic camera, the flicker of fluorescent ceiling lights, the suggestion of neon lights. The flashing light is characteristic of modernity and appropriate to Alphaville, but it’s also crucial in itself (without interpretation) as a filmic image.

After the flashing lights we see a train cross a bridge in the darkness, its illuminated windows loom blankly. Then on
In this one sequence the whole substance and strategy of Alphaville stands revealed. This architecture of flickering light is the film. From A Bout de Souffle onwards, Godard was committed to filming in natural light and to the method of location shooting as opposed to the artificial light of the film studio .To realise his idea of making the present look like the dystopian future, Godard created an atmosphere of high contrast without using any additional lights, regardless of low light conditions. Suzanne Schiffman recalled:
Alphaville was shot pretty much without any light, in the dark, Coutard said, ‘we’ll put a little light, and i’ll stop down the lens, it will amount to the same thing, it will be very dark.’ Godard refused:always the need for the real. He shot without movie lights, with a special film that was very fast, but even so!…It became the joke of the film ‘we won’t see a thing!’ ‘Yes,but we’re shooting anyway.’ (Schiffman,cited in