Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 ALPHAVILLE Screens at MoMA
/“Got a light?” “I’ve traveled 9,000 kilometers to give it to you.”
Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina in a scene from ALPHAVILLE
In typical Godardian fashion, ALPHAVILLE is a science fiction film, shot entirely on location, which uses no special frills to create a futuristic, truly alien ambience. Classical Parisian architecture mingles with Modernist high-rise buildings, and characters refer both to an imaginary future and to real current events. ALPHAVILLE is as slick, stylish, and improvisational as its New Wave siblings, but it is more concerned with big concepts like history, authoritarianism, and individual freedom than it is with interpersonal relationships. In the titular ALPHAVILLE, love, poetry, and emotion are banned, but that doesn’t stop Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) and programmer Natasha von Braun (Anna Karina) from falling for each other anyway. With roots in the Bible, Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, and Jean Coctueau’s Orpheus, ALPHAVILLE is a science-fiction, neo-noir, multi-hyphenate genre film for the postmodern age. “To understand ALPHAVILLE is to understand Godard” (Andrew Sarris).
Gartenberg Media includes this amazing 1965 French New Wave classic in it’s distribution catalog along with outstanding examples of World Cinema Selects, available on Blu-Ray and DVD and as a downloadable DSL files.