Alphaville. 1965. France. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. With Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff. In French; English subtitles. World premiere of new 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative made by Studiocanal at Hiventy, with the support of the CNC. 99 min.
“Got a light?” “I’ve traveled 9,000 kilometers to give it to you.”
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 Cocteau’s Orpheus, Alphaville is a science-fiction, neo-noir, multi-hyphenate genre film for the postmodern age. Since its founding, Rialto has reissued most of the early work of Godard, including Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and Contempt. “To understand Alphaville is to understand Godard” (Andrew Sarris).