This year we mark the 50th anniversary of Jean-Luc Godard’s sci-fi thriller, Alphaville. The futuristic-seeming settings and the presence of actor Eddie Constantine assure us that this is indeed a sci-fi thriller, but this is a Godard film so its also a movie about movies. Here’s the word from the British Film Institute…

While the narrative is formulaic, combining a series of conventions from several genres (science fiction, film noir, crime films), Godard’s imagery is dense with references to history and cultural texts and often anti-illusionist. If Godard’s nouvelle vague colleague François Truffaut failed to make a completely satisfying interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) the following year, Godard succeeds in making Brechtian science fiction with social satire and critique.

Pulp-fiction secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a character originally created by British writer Peter Cheyney and which Constantine had already played in many films (he also reappears as Caution in Godard’s later Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991), travels to the dystopian, technocratic world of Alphaville – a night’s drive through ‘sidereal space’ in his Ford Galaxie. He poses as a journalist from the ‘Outlands’ with a secret mission to neutralise the mastermind of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon), and destroy Alpha 60, the super-computer that controls the city and its people, imposing its logical orientation on all aspects of social organisation. Individualism has been all but eliminated in the logical world of Alphaville. Thus in Alphaville emotion is forbidden, and anyone who reveals emotional behaviour, such as weeping, is arrested and executed in public spectacles.

As is typical of Godard’s early work, the story is a pretext for an investigation of a variety of artistic, philosophical and political issues, including the nature and function of art, the power of language and the relation of ideology and culture – issues that came increasingly to the fore as Godard’s career grew more overtly political in the late 1960s.

The film anticipates Godard’s subsequent abandonment of narrative in favour of a more experimental approach, encouraging viewers to question how film images signify, thus positioning us in direct opposition to the citizens of Alphaville, who are outlawed from asking ‘Why?’ Because Alpha 60 is omnipresent and omniscient in Alphaville, the computer’s voice periodically acts as a voice-of-God narrator. And despite the film’s futuristic setting, Godard uses no special effects and no sets, but only actual locations in Paris, the city’s modern (at the time) glass and concrete architecture convincingly signifying its dystopian vision. The seemingly endless corridors of office buildings through which Raoul Coutard’s camera tracks indicates just how impersonal the world had already become.

Here is British writer and film producer Colin McCabe recalling this landmark film…

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The television show In Search Of is a strange little chestnut from my childhood. I knew the show’s host, Leonard Nimoy from his turn as “Spock” in Star Trek repeats, and In Search Of’s focus on unexplained phenomena, missing persons and extraterrestrial encounters was right on target for a kid who already loved Sci-Fi.

I remember being terrified by the “Bigfoot” episode of the show and equally traumatized when the program took its cameras beneath the deep green waters of Loch Ness. But, not all of the show’s subjects were so “out there.” In 1980, their “Lee Harvey Oswald” episode dramatized the circumstances surrounding the assassination of JFK, including key evidence from authors and experts along the way.

The result is an insightful portrait of the self-proclaimed “patsy” that challenges the “lone gunman” contentions of the Warren Report. The centerpiece of the show is a Dallas police dictaphone recording that proves that there were four shots in Dealey Plaza that day in 1963. The recording confirmed a shot coming from the “Grassy Knoll” and the existence of a second shooter. The evidence was presented to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and published their findings in 1979. Among their conclusions:

Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots at Kennedy. The second and third shots Oswald fired struck the President. The third shot he fired killed the President.
Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that at least two gunmen fired at the President. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Soviet Government was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Cuban Government was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that anti-Castro Cuban groups, as groups, were not involved in the assassination of Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency were not involved in the assassination of Kennedy.
Agencies and departments of the U.S. Government performed with varying degrees of competency in the fulfilment of their duties. President Kennedy did not receive adequate protection. A thorough and reliable investigation into the responsibility of Lee Harvey Oswald for the assassination was conducted. The investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive.
The Committee further concluded that it was probable that:

four shots were fired
the third shot came from a second assassin located on the grassy knoll, but missed. They concluded that it missed due to the lack of physical evidence of an actual bullet, of course this investigation took place almost sixteen years after the crime.

Find out more. Watch “In Search Of: Lee Harvey Oswald”

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