Word: godard
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...Miss Goya is a bitch goddess: she looks like a captivating thirteen-year-old and possesses the assurance of a woman of the world. The assurance comes from keeping only herself in mind. Not that it requires effort. With a bitch goddess, concentration on self is spontaneous, not disciplined. Godard sees this type as the Eternal Woman--others who don't reach that peak of cogism are God's failures...
...Masculine/Feminine every move of Jean-Luc Godard's camera or actors seems whimsical and capricious. The result is off-the-cuff brilliance with interruptions...
Miss Goya may sound formidable, but half the mystery springs from her not acting formidable most of the time. Godard captures her self-centeredness by focusing on her trivial gestures--incessant slow hair-combing, contemplative re-rouging, a monologue that skips carelessly from sex to her new blue coat. Leaud plays a jokier person than Miss Goya, except when he is with Miss Goya. We watch while he and a Marx-spouting companion lounge in a cafe, get up one at a time, borrow sugar from a table nearby. The two are inspecting the breasts of a lady sitting...
...from the collapse of Hollywood in the early '50s and the revival of Europe as a center of film production. Since the European industry was small and loosely organized, such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard could pretty well shoot them as they saw them and let the censor take the hindmost. As a result, they made a number of fine far-out films (The Bicycle Thief, Wild Strawberries, 8½, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, The 400 Blows, Breathless) that made a startling amount of money...
Look for symbols and esoteric meanings if you want. But if you do, you will be making "Alphaville" far deeper than Godard does. Godard is concerned with a contemporary world that is young, that lives, that is full of sex and violence and triteness that produces Batmen and Lone Rangers and Lemmy Cautions. Take what's there and enjoy it. Godard does. As Caution says, "Everything is screwy in this damn town...