Jean-Luc Godard Box Set - Alphaville/Le Petit Soldat/Une Femme Est Une Femme [DVD] [1965]

Godard made "A Bout de Souffle" ("Breathless") in four weeks, in 1959. He developed a style of remaining distanced, of observing his characters, often leaving them to improvise while he tried to capture the immediacy of their action and reaction. In "Breathless" Jean-Paul Belmondo establishes a new noir, a rugged French antihero.

It's success led to the shooting of "Le Petit Soldat" ("The Little Soldier") in 1960, but banned in France for three years because it emphasised the brutality of both sides. Made at the height of the Algerian crisis, its hero, Bruno, is a draft-dodger, hiding in Switzerland from conscription into the army. Bruno, however, gets caught up in the undercover anti-terrorist campaign and is ordered to kill a Swiss journalist who has shown too much sympathy for the wrong side.

This is a gritty tale of espionage, a thriller stripped to its black and white bones. Godard, the enigmatic story teller, makes references outside the film, reminding the audience that they are watching a movie.

Bruno is self-centred, self-absorbed - his actions or inactions place his girlfriend, Anna Karina, at risk. He becomes a Hamlet like character - temporising, postponing. There's irony in the title: he's a runaway soldier who won't obey orders, who stops to think before he acts, who is capable of disobedience.

"Une Femme est Une Femme" was Godard's first film in cinemascope and colour, and represents an escapism from the bleakness of his first two films. For a man who pursued a stylised realism, "Une Femme" was conceived as a musical, the most unreal form of cinema. It references many of Godard's influences: again starring Belmondo, at one stage in the film he declares that he is off to watch "A Bout de Souffle".

Godard combines old style romantic comedy and musical with the reality of Paris, a grim little apartment, and the sleazy atmosphere of his heroine's workplace. A limited plot - Angela (Anna Karina) works as a stripper, lives with her boyfriend, and wants a baby. When he refuses to give her one, she invites her other friend, Belmondo, to do the job. Not much of a plot, but it serves as the vehicle for Godard to play with images of the cinema. What emerges is an extraordinarily funny and entertaining movie.

Anna Karina was a 60's icon, a woman who defined a style - extraordinarily beautiful, coquettish, and obviously adored by the camera. "Une Femme" is largely a tale of how men and women communicate - not face to face, but by ritual, by symbol, and by sex. Life is as much about the war of the sexes as the class war. Women consciously put on a performance, men convince themselves they are acting rationally and dispassionately.

Godard emblazons the film with tricks and jokes. He deliberately disrupts continuity, distorts sound, injects music in all the wrong places, has his characters talk to the audience, pose, play for the camera. The camera, meanwhile, can be indiscriminate, cutting characters out of the frame, ruthlessly panning and tracking to emphasise their actions. And the whole production builds up to the delivery of the greatest and worst little pun in cinema history.

The humour takes a blacker twist in "Alphaville". Originally entitled "Tarzan vs. IBM", Godard here combines a futuristic, science fiction tale with American gangster noir and the comic book tradition to explore the dehumanising effects of computers and the corporate identities they create. Made in 1965, its vision is extraordinary. While the 'new' technology demonstrated in the film now appears clunky and quaint, "Alphaville" parallels Orwell's "1984" in creating a dystopic vision of the future.

Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is agent 003, a Dick Tracy character, complete with trenchcoat, felt hat, Zippo, and a .45 calibre automatic. He has come to Alphaville to assassinate its dictator, Professor Von Braun. This is a city ruled by the computer, the Alpha-60, and its scientist creators and neophytes. Politics no longer exists, only the dehumanising logic of the binary system.

Shot in Paris on a very tight budget, Godard makes graphic use of his surroundings, playing with the black and white images and emphasising the ruggedness of Constantine and the striking beauty of Anna Karina. In doing so, he revisits a science fiction theme - computers and new technology will transform the physical world, this is true, but their most immediate, global, and lasting impact will be in the reconfiguration of the human mind and consciousness.

The film opens with the legend, "Sometimes ...reality is too complex for oral communication." While Godard will employ his typical blend of visual imagery, flashing words and still pictures on the screen, making philosophical and literary references beyond the story, etc., "Alphaville" follows a more obviously linear, narrative path than his earlier films.

In this futuristic world, people are no longer capable of free thought. They must adhere to the control of the computer. Each hotel room is equipped with a bible - in the form of a dictionary which lists what words are acceptable and what their meaning must be. Those who express the forbidden emotion of love or who betray contrary thinking are to be executed. The computer interrogates those suspected of crime, denouncing them as liars if they do not adhere to established truths.

Godard's films are amongst the most vital and influential in European cinema, not least because they are consciously presented as cinema and not simply as narratives. He challenges his audience to observe, to think, not simply to absorb and follow the linear path of the celluloid. Nearly half a century later, and they remain extraordinary pieces which deserve to be viewed and reviewed by anyone with an interest in cinema or filmmaking, and by anyone with a creative imagination who requires stimulation and challenge, not commercial pap and formulaic glamour.

The DVD package is potentially exciting, but loses somewhat in its value by the presentation. "Alphaville", in particular, is robbed of some of its quality because it is not shown in widescreen and the subtitles (which appear accurate enough) tend to intrude into the visual images Godard is presenting. The set would have benefited from the inclusion of extras - even simple 'making of' reappraisals. Instead, the viewer needs to go and read around, learn something of Godard's techniques and use of imagery. So, while the films each rightly deserve a five star rating, the package only warrants four.