Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville”

Alphaville
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, 99 min, France, in French w/ English subtitles, B&W, DCP)

Introduced by Alex Cunningham (AMI) & Hank Okazaki (AMI)

In Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard fuses a hardboiled detective story with science fiction. Lemmy Caution, a hero Godard borrowed from a series of French adventure films, comes to Alphaville, the capital of a totalitarian state, in order to destroy its leader, an almost-human computer called Alpha 60.  Void of any flashy special effects, Alphaville uses 1960s Paris to depict the city of the future. Combining a series of conventions from several genres (science fiction, film noir, crime films), Godard’s imagery is dense with references to history and cultural texts and often anti-illusionist. Godard succeeds in making Brechtian science fiction with social satire and critique.

“Both derivative and prophetic, this New Wave dystopian fable both looks back at the history of cinema and forward to its future. Hail, Lemmy Caution, father of Rick Deckard.”
— James Verniere, Boston Globe