Influences
Jean Cocteau was one of the artists who exerted significant influences on Godard's films, and parallels between Alphaville and Cocteau's 1950 film Orpheus are evident. For example, Orphée's search for Cégeste and Caution's for Harry Dickson, between the poems Orphée hears on the radio and the aphoristic questions given by Alpha 60, between Orphée's victory over Death through the recovery of his poetic powers and Caution's use of poetry to destroy Alpha 60. Moreover, Godard openly acknowledges his debt to Cocteau on several occasions. When Alpha 60 is destroyed, for instance, people stagger down labyrinthine corridors or cling blindly to the walls like the inhabitants of Cocteau's "Zone de la mort", and, at the end of the film, Caution tells Natasha not to look back. Godard compares this scene with Orphée's warning to Eurydice, and it is also possible to detect a reference here to the flight from Sodom.
The voice of Alpha 60, played by a man with a mechanical voice box replacing his cancer-damaged larynx, descends from the hypnotic power of Mabuse's disembodied voice in the 1933 film The Testament of Dr Mabuse.
The film production company Alphaville Pictures, co-founded in 2003 by Danish director Christoffer Boe, is named after the film.
German synthpop band Alphaville took their name from the film.
Alphaville also inspired the London based organisation Alpha-ville, to create a festival that explores the intersection between art, society and technology.
Read more about this topic: Alphaville (film)
Famous quotes containing the word influences:
“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. Once and again one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward.... The attacks they sustain are more cruel than the collision of arms.... Friends desert and despise them.... They stand alone and oftentimes are made bitter by their isolation.... They are doing nothing less than defy public opinion, and shall they convert it by blows. Yes.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)