Alphaville
May 30 - Jun 05, 2014
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1965, DCP, 99 min)
Ostensibly a sci-fi genre exercise about a nightmarish future, Alphaville is unmistakably about Now. And Now isn’t a very pretty place in this nocturnal, intellectually rigorous, bleak satire of the ‘60s at their exact mid-point. As always, Godard makes a virtue out of his budgetary limitations, taking the aspects of contemporary Paris he finds de-humanizing and making “special effects” out of them (making the nightmare that much more present and real).
Eddie Constantine is Lemmy Caution, a role he played many times in French pulp fiction,—here, he is a parody of the hard-boiled hero. Anna Karina is the girl who represents a chance for Lemmy to escape Alphaville; but the dominant presence is Alpha 60, the computer that runs the city. Peppering the proceedings with poetic musings about the State of Things, Alpha 60 is a rasping, gurgling Greek Chorus: voiced by none other than Jean-Luc Godard himself.
"it can be hard to drill through the ossified crust of reverence and influence that has grown over Godard's work. . .But the surprising, welcoming thing about this restoration is how quickly such barriers fade: Alphaville is a haunting, fascinating place." —The Stranger
- Part of our series Godard Does Himself, screening through June 5. Read More >