Eddie Constantine (1917-1993), the US-born French actor who plays Lemmy
Caution in Godard’s brilliant 1965 sci-fi thriller Alphaville, having
played the same character in a string of B movies shot in France in the
fifties.
In Nouvelle Observateur’s double-page spread on the film on 6 May 1965
two scientists noted that Alpha 60 (the supercomputer that is one of the
two villains of Godard’s story) was modelled on the recently developed
Bull computer Gamma 60. In his guide to the film Chris Darke notes that
they agreed that the film’s idea of a ‘schism between the technocrats
and the people’ was accurate. ‘The scientists agreed that “the
impoverishment of language and the simplification of syntax are real”
and they considered this as inevitably accompanying the “robotization”
of humanity’. Darke adds, ‘In retrospect, what’s interesting about their
account is how closely the two scientists saw Godard’s vision as
corresponding to contemporary trends’ (Darke, Alphaville, p.69).
De Gaulle’s France saw two radically different responses to automation,
on one side an elite orthodoxy shared by de Gaulle’s technocrats and by
left intellectuals like Alain Resnais, Raymond Queneau, Pierre Naville
and Serge Mallet that viewed automation in largely positive terms, even
gushing poetry at the sight of a modern oil refinery (as Naville did
when he first saw the Esso-France refinery in Port-Jérôme), and on the
other the disquieting view (more widely shared) reflected in
Alphaville’s trenchant critique of the emerging hi-tech capitalism of
the early sixties. Reflecting on the 45 years that had transpired since
Godard made his film, the UK writer/film maker Peter Whitehead
attributed a ‘sublime clairvoyance’ to it. He was especially struck by
Godard’s predictions about the degradation of language, saying, ‘Today
we have a world in which all communication has been hijacked by the
media’. (Whitehead produced the first properly written screenplay of the
film when he asked Godard for the rights to translate it.)
Here’s a rapid summary of the plot. Caution arrives in Alphaville on a
mission to abduct or kill Professor von Braun, the creator of
Alphaville, and destroy Alpha 60, the all-powerful computer that runs
the city like a huge technocratic dystopia, having banned feelings and
self-expression so that people live purely by logic, devoid of emotions.
‘Visually, the entire film is very dark, being shot throughout Paris
without any lighting studios, within a natural darkness, which resulted
in some 3000 meters of unusable footage, some of which Godard used
anyway.’ Piercing through this darkness is Eddie Constantine, and his
white Ford Galaxy, wearing a long trench coat, an American private eye
figure who disregards everyone he comes into contact with. He is
constantly taking pictures with his camera, something which is
completely foreign to Alphaville where no one thinks of the past or the
future. Indeed, time takes on an interesting representation in
Alphaville where everything seems to move in a kind of circular motion.
Alpha 60 itself says, “Time is like a circle which turns endlessly”.
Caution falls in love with the scientist’s daughter Natasha (Anna
Karina), but finds he has to teach her the meaning of the word love,
since human emotions have been expunged from Alphaville’s allowable
vocabulary and any expression of them invites death. ‘Anna Karina is at
her most darkly luminous’ as the great leader's daughter, wrote one
critic. ‘Her programmed responses slowly break down as the hardboiled
detective gives (her) a copy of poet Paul Eluard's Capital of Pain and
introduces her to concepts like ‘consciousness’ and ‘love’—words with
which she is unfamiliar, since they have been progressively redacted
from the dictionary that is the Bible of her father's totalitarian
state. “Nearly every day, words disappear because they are forbidden,”
she tells him.’ (Richard Williams, The Guardian, 28 Dec. 2011)
So Alphaville is as much about language and the loss of meaning as it is
about light. (When we hear Natasha’s voice for the first time, she asks,
‘Have you got a light?’. ‘Yeah’, Lemmy replies, as he brings the flame
to her cigarette. ‘I came 9,000 kilometres to give it to you.’) This was
a futurism in reverse that projected the present as its dystopian
future, shooting a fictional city in a far corner of the galaxy on
location in Paris. ‘I’m telling the story of a man from twenty years ago
who discovers the world today and can’t believe it’, Godard told Le
Monde. Economically, Gamma 60 was a disaster for Compagnie des Machines
Bull (today still Europe’s largest computer maker); ‘the Gamma 60 was
slow in development, late in delivery, and plagued by a series of
mechanical flaws’, and the gamble forced the company into a series of
alliances with IBM’s chief competitors, first GE, then Honeywell.
Godard’s working title for Alphaville had been ‘Tarzan vs. IBM’. He
described Alpha 60 as ‘a type of machine one hundred thousand times more
perfect but analogous in principle to the computers already in use in
companies like IBM, General Electric, etc.’. As Utterson points out,
‘IBM, in particular, is implicitly positioned as the equivalent of the
elite technicians of Alphaville’. Godard’s nocturnal dystopia could also
be seen as a memory of the future. The founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson,
had made no attempt to hide his fascist sympathies and maintained active
links with Nazi Germany as late as 1940. The Hollerith machines were
leased to concentration camps where among other functions they were used
to keep track of prisoners’ ethnicity and religion. And Alphaville
contains coded allusions to the Nazi past, such as the numbers tattooed
on the skin of the séductrices, the state-controlled sex workers whose
services are the standard form of distraction in this city.
‘Discovers the world today and can’t believe it’. How much truer that
would be today, with the rapid spread of intelligent automation systems
(AI), the explosive growth of that giant robot called the ‘Internet of
Things’ (‘Industry 4.0’), new forms of mass surveillance (outdoor
surveillance cameras will be the largest market for 5G IoT devices in
the coming years), the real-time monitoring of employees (the kind of
computerized Taylorism that now controls the labor process in, say,
large distribution centres such as Amazon’s ‘fulfilment centers’), and
more generally what Google employees have described as an
‘unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation’.
Currently AI is being extended from shop floors and supply chains to
call centres, warehouses, and retail outlets, but even more
interestingly to a host of white-collar occupations as well, as
increasingly sophisticated algorithms allow for the automation of
cognitive tasks and start eroding the jobs of journalists, business
researchers, equity traders (this tribe has disappeared), paralegals and
junior lawyers, and even software engineers. With computerization
extending to a growing range of such ‘non-routine’ tasks, McKinsey has
forecast that ‘sophisticated algorithms could substitute for
approximately 140 million full-time knowledge workers worldwide’.
Consider the implications of this for our use of language.
This is Marx’s theme of humanity’s subjugation by the machine reworked
as automation capital. The cutting edge today is neither AI nor IoT by
themselves but the growing integration between those technologies, as
vendors of IoT platforms such as Amazon, GE, IBM and Microsoft offer
integrated AI capabilities. In fact, machine learning for predictive
capabilities is now integrated with most major horizontal
(general-purpose) and industrial IoT platforms (Schatsky et al.,
‘Intelligent IoT’). The synergies here are obvious: the IoT delivers
vast amounts of real-time data, which is the fuel behind machines
‘learning’ to do various things. Alpha 60 wanted a predictable world.
Its watchwords were SILENCE. LOGIC. SECURITY. PRUDENCE. With its
repeated allusion to feelings and imagination and poetry and their
subversive potential, Godard’s parable was essentially a way of saying
that no computer would ever be able to write a modern-day version of
Capital or truly understand The Wasteland, let alone fall in love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-nY6l7PhEI
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