Post #100 on this blog, and the auto-generated e-mail center at tumblr has dependably sent a little note to my inbox, letting me know, again, that I am an awesome citizen and human being. I have also made a movie gif for this post – it just worked out that way, the last of a series of thematic posts about Godard’s 1965 film, ALPHAVILLE, which screened at the Pacific Cinematheque this past weekend. So, a little moving picture for you, and a real denizen of the tumblrland flea/free market I am coming to be. But, as is the habit, I push against total assimilation via a surfeit of words. Who’d want to re-post a thing like this, all this voluminous text in tiny font, attached to a matchbook-sized animated film still? I know I wouldn’t – so there’s the resistance, if a feeble and abstruse one. Scroll through the never-ending scrolling feeds of movie gifs on this and other sites, and it’s like a whole other updated definition of “cinéma du look”. Two- to ten-second loops, arranged in a long vertical line: Give me some funny, give me some feels – keep it fragmented (there’s the frisson) – and philosophy, I’ll take away, in my own way. Even the sound has been excised; the look is all. And the subtitles which are sometimes included: essential context-signifiers, never quite transferrable as stand-alone quotations or bon mots, always in service to the flipbook images – a Disney actress crinkling her nose at you, fabulous dance moves plus sparkles, Milla Jovovich/Samuel L. Jackson getting ready to pump your zombie/gangster ass full of lead. So, for this thing here, ended up reducing the duration of the clip: first, for file size reasons (the original gif, half a minute long, a smooth-running, silvery-looking thing, even on full-screen mode – and the file size about as big as your average hip-hop mixtape download); then, for other aesthetic and/or philosophical reasons as well. (If you are still reading this: Who are you, and how did you get here?) Anna Karina, playing Natacha von Braun, the premier daughter of techno-dystopia Alphaville, speaks the closing lines & words of the film, just before the final frames above. If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to be spoilered, I type it out in French, so you can avert your eyes or have your brain put up a Gallic firewall: “Je… vous… aime. Je vous aime.” Cue swelling finale musique. Aforementioned reservations and reflections of aesthetics and philosophy, in short: The disquieting effect of the full clip in looped replay – of the actress & film character being made to return, as it were, in hypothetically endless repeat plays, to the moment of confusion and discomfiture as she haltingly finds the words, “I… love… you…” Replicant girlfriend, just spit it out – that’s the less charitable, less enamoured spirit that takes over, after, say, the fifth, or fiftieth, replay. Cf, film producer Katherine Haber’s commentary on the Sean Young/Harrison Ford “love scene” in another seminal sci-fi movie: “That was not a love scene, that was a hate scene.” Which is not on par, exactly, with what’s happening in this scene, in this movie, obviously – but in gif-captured isolation, reduction and repetition, a cumulation of like effect. Haven’t read much of what feminist film theorists may or may not have written about Godard, but I get the sense that they would lay into him real good, on several points, legitimately, from films situated all over the truly varied and thoroughly astonishing decades-long career. But as with JLG’s previous controversies with Catholics and the Vatican, and other ongoing contentions with Zionists and/or Jews, the particular politics and sympathies not always so easily parsed or sussed out. And when Anna Karina’s character asks for help (“Aidez-moi”) in recalling those words which she has neither been taught nor has ever spoken, Lemmy Caution/Eddie Constantine tells her: “Impossible, princesse. Il faut y arriver toute seul. Alors vous serez sauvée.” (“Impossible, princess. You have to get there on your own. Then you will be saved.”) The tone, chauvinistic, in keeping with genre tropes – but the plain meaning, something tough and generous, and human. The secret agent, having quietly, privately broken ranks long ago – no taste for those mind-conditioning games. And so she’ll work it out, in her own way and time, as you drive together into that gorgeous and shaky night. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – sure, whatever. But whatever the planet of your provenance, we’ve all taken up this fraught residence in a place called “Alphaville”; and each of us, capable of such tenderness and treachery, with words that we keep remembering and forgetting in all their right and wrong places. And unless you are part of that small percentage of the population that comes from Pluto (not even a planet anymore, a place of sociopaths), you also will have the need to hear those words, to hear them spoken, by yourself to others, and by others to you: romantically, filially, fraternally, erotically, religiously, what else have you. And to have the wisdom & the discretion to know that these words, above all others, cannot be forced or coerced, and that they cannot be set on repeat-play, ad infinitum, gif-style, to be easily and widely “shared” and “liked”.
In real life, as it sometimes is and isn’t in art, this would be folly, sickness, tyranny, and not a love scene. “Je t’aime – je t’aime!” “Moi non plus.” Oncle Serge, no one’s even offended, much less impressed. The decent children just shake their heads and laugh, as they discreetly take leave of the room. “Bonnie & Clyde” – play that one again. The kids might come back, dance for a little while, before they head off to better parties someplace else. And as for you, tough guy: Time to get off this tumblr, time to get on the case. – La fin –
