Location, location, dislocation

I have been reflecting on two French films, made in Paris in the mid-1960s. Among other things, they are both about alienation in the modern city, and in Paris in particular. Alphaville, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, was released in 1965, and is a dystopian science fiction thriller set in the future, in which the redemption of love overcomes the forces of authoritarianism. I have loved the film since I first saw it at the Cinephone on Bristol Street in Birmingham in 1966. Playtime, directed by and starring Jacques Tati, was released in 1967. It is a comedy, a satire on the sterility and dysfunctionalism of the modern city, in which Tati’s character, the hapless M. Hulot, stumbles from one misreading of place to another.

It had not struck me before how similar they are, despite their severe difference in tone. They both present a modern city which is oppressively corporate and anonymous, which the individual travels through without finding comfort or security. It is hostile and life-threatening in one film, eccentrically bonkers in the other. What is fascinating is the contrasting ways in which the city was constructed in the two films.

To create Alpha 60, futuristic capital city of a distant galaxy, Godard simply filmed Paris in 1965: mostly at night, with the camera lens partly closed to make it darker still. Illuminated office blocks, harsh fluorescent lighting, vehicle headlights, neon signs, long empty corridors – nothing is created specially for the film, just selected. The meta-narrative, if you look for it, is clear: modern Paris is a place of menace and alienation - Capitale de la Douleur, in the title of Paul Eluard’s book of poems, which Anna Karina reads at one point in the film. Alphaville was shot quickly and expediently, with a limited cast, in a couple of months. Tati’s vision was grander. It took him nearly three years to film, and it bankrupted him. His ambition could not be accommodated on location in Paris, nor was there a studio lot big enough. So he built his own city, at vast expense, on the Plateau de Gravelle in Joinville, to the east of Paris. He constructed full-size buildings and streets, and also built 15m-high pictures of multistorey office blocks, on wheels, which could be moved around to form very convincing townscapes, of depressing authenticity. In one of many good jokes, we see advertisements for travel to Mexico, Japan, USA and Stockholm, all featuring a photograph of the same stereotypical modernist office block. The buildings on wheels are indeed similar to the five office high-rises, built 1952-66, which are lined up next to Stockholm’s Sergels Torg.

Both films draw attention to buildings with glass walls, and glass doors, and both demonstrate a paradox. Glass allows visual information to be seen, destroying privacy without allowing real communication or intimacy, but at the same time it forcibly separates spatially, either preventing movement or, at best, confusing it. In Godard’s film the effect is threatening and sinister. The transparency enables surveillance: everyone in Alpha 60 is being spied upon. In Tati’s film the effect is comic, although the implicit critique of architecture is a serious one. Hulot is repeatedly confounded by glass doors. At one point his confusion results in a restaurant door shattering into a heap of fragments. The doorman continues to usher customers in, holding the surviving door handle to open the non-existent door in a sweeping gesture of welcome. 

Similarly, reflections in glass feature in both films. The reflections in the glass hotel lift in Alphaville are disturbing and confusing, expressive of the anxiety of living in a police state run by a malevolent computer. In Playtime the effect of the reflections is absurd – Hulot pursues a reflection of his quarry who is actually waving from behind him – or just playful – scaled-down pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the floodlit Basilica du Sacre-Coeur, built in Joinville, are seen momentarily reflected in glass doors as they swing open. One fictional city that is actually real, one real city that is actually fictional. They fit together like two sides of the same coin.