KLAATU YOU (28)

By: Karinne Keithley Syers
July 8, 2020

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite pre-Star Wars science fiction movies.

ALPHAVILLE | d. JEAN-LUC GODARD | 1965

When I watched Alphaville 20 years after I first saw it, I realized that I loved it then because the film is a dance. At that time in my life I was actively a dancer-choreographer, and in both capacities I was trying to relearn how to be in and make dances, aiming slightly (or maybe very much) to the side of how I had learned those things in my training. I don’t think I recognized then that it was a dance film. I sampled sound from the film directly into several sound scores for my friend Chris Yon’s dances, which partook of the same strange worldbuilding dislogic of Alphaville. The pitch-shifted computer voice droning “occupé, occupé, libre, occupé…” to announce the status of each door along a hallway of interrogation rooms accessing the region-controlling supercomputer who has destroyed poetry in favor of logic always seemed like something akin to a square dance caller in a less happy world. But when I re-watched the film I realized that it really is made as much of dancing as it is of photography.

Consider these elements: the oblique narration that intermittently streams into the sequences in a tempo less like a narrative frame and more like light moving into and out of a break between clouds, setting the piece in a kind of compressed zone of feeling that asks you to accept intuitive understanding that can’t quite access logic (“That’s always how it is. You never understand everything”); sudden orchestral pulses of sound punctuating silence, not simply underscoring or crafting the feeling of the film in the normal soundtrack sense, but operating as a fully independent element of its composition; the silence in itself, zero sound, a total room-tone evacuated silence that often belongs to dances (at least in the post-Judson tradition) but almost never to movies, silence as a space of expansion against which the precise actions of a moving body are articulated in high relief, a Cagean silence; the bodies — oh my god the bodies — pressed against the walls, sloughing surfaces and losing their vertical axes as if in a 2 AM contact improv trance jam in which humans partner buildings; the synchronicity, the pathways, the precision of every visible movement, nothing naturalistic, not even the breathing. And I suppose there’s something too, of dance, in the gravitational pull of Anna Karina’s beauty. As a dancer I always found the beauty thing a weird knot that I never managed to untie: on the one hand, while moving or choreographically setting in motion, gratitude for the thrill of experiential clarity and potentiality that attaches to a body moving freely in space, on the other, the weird offering, part narcissistic, part deep-time female inheritance, of making oneself visible, being the beautiful object for the gaze of others.

Maybe, aside from all that, though, Alphaville’s secret status as dance film can offer something useful to any project of poetic sci-fi: choreographic thinking as a kind of acceleration into weirdness; a world-building communicated instantaneously in the evidence of altered embodiment; an off-kilter sequential possibility in narrative that lets us leap right into strange human experience in an imagined other world.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

KLAATU YOU (28)

Categories

Tags