Event

Alphaville

Godard Does Himself

May 30 - Jun 05

(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1965, DCP, 99 min)

Friday, May 30 at 07:00PM
Saturday, May 31 at 07:00PM
Sunday, Jun 01 at 07:00PM
Monday, Jun 02 at 01:00PM
Tuesday, Jun 03 at 07:00PM
Wednesday, Jun 04 at 07:00PM
Thursday, Jun 05 at 07:00PM
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.