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  • Actor Anna Karina stands behind a man, her arm over his right shoulder and her palm splayed out in front of his chin.
  • Actor Anna Karina sits at a table with a man, and holds her index finger over her mouth in a
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ALPHAVILLE

2:50

Thursday, January 30

(1965, Jean-Luc Godard) … or A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution. In Alphaville, hints of emotion are cause for liquidation and “people should not ask ‘why,’ but only say ‘because’.” New mission for hard smoking and drinking, babe-chasing Lemmy Caution, incarnated by American expat singer Eddie Constantine in seven previous pulp film thrillers – but here a disillusioned agent in a Bogartian trenchcoat: a trip to the future, trekking through space to find missing agent Akim Tamiroff, track down Howard Vernon’s Professor “von Braun,” aided by prof’s daughter Anna Karina, and square-off in a final showdown with “Alpha-60.” Godard creates an eerie sense of sci-fi alienation with striking b&w shooting – sans artificial light – by the great Raoul Coutard on the all-location-shot wintry streets of Paris ’65. But Karina has the last three words. Original title: Tarzan vs. IBM. DCP. Approx. 100 min.

Reviews

“Tough gumshoe Lemmy Caution turns inter-galactic agent to re-enact the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice by conquering Alpha 60, the strange automated city from which such concepts as love and tenderness have been banished. As in Antonioni’s The Red Desert, Godard’s theme is alienation in a technological society, but his shotgun marriage between the poetry of legend and the irreverence of strip cartoons takes the film into entirely idiosyncratic areas. Not the least astonishing thing is the way Coutard’s camera turns contemporary Paris into an icily dehumanized city of the future.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

Film Forum