Événement

Alphaville @ Robert Classic French Film Festival

Alphaville
(Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution)
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, 99 min., DCP projection source

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Jean-Luc Godards irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of the malevolent Alpha 60, a computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientists beautiful daughter Natasha (Godard muse Anna Karina), Lemmy must unravel the mysteries of the strictly logical Alpha 60 and teach Natasha the meaning of the word love.

Calling the film a hyper-sci-fi-meta-noir, which skylarks about an absurd dystopian future in the wet streets of 1965 Paris, the Village Voices Michael Atkinson describes Alphaville as all totemic genre gestures all the time: Everything is a dislocated signifier of totalitarian confusion language, institutional sex, assassination attempts, scientific lingo, modernist architecture, bureaucracy, human emotion (officially outlawed, but shruggingly prevalent), Anna Karinas luminous eyes. But its all also a Godardian gag, a riff on artifice and the blithe joy of cinematic bullshit. Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, its a thing of insensible beauty.

With an introduction and post-film discussion by Andrew Wyatt, film critic for Cinema St. Louis The Lens and the Gateway Cinephile film blog.