Alphaville [Blu-ray]

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Overview

In Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard fuses a hardboiled detective story with science fiction. Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), 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. While on his mission, Lemmy meets and falls in love with Natacha (Anna Karina), the daughter of the scientist who designed Alpha 60. Their love becomes the most profound challenge to the computer's control. Void of any flashy special effects, Alphaville uses 1960s Paris to depict the city of the future.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/09/2019
UPC:	0738329238803
Original Release:	1965
Rating:	NR
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W]
Sound:	[DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound]
Language:	English
Time:	1:39:00
Sales rank:	22,366

Special Features

Audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas; Anna Karina interview; Colin McCabe introduction; Theatrical trailer

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Eddie Constantine	Lemmy Caution
Anna Karina	Natacha Von Braun
Akim Tamiroff	Henri Dickson
L?szl? Szab?	L'ing?nieur en chef
Howard Vernon	Le professeur L?onard Nosferatu
Michel Delahaye	Von Braun's Assistant
Jean-Louis Comolli	Professor Jeckell
Christa Lang	Seductress
Jean-Andr? Fieschi	le professeur Heckel
Jean-Pierre L?aud	Actor
Paul Misraki	Composer

Technical Credits

Jean-Luc Godard

Andre Michelin	Producer
Jean-Luc Godard	Screenwriter
Ren? Levert	Sound Effects,Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

In 1965, six years after his feature film debut with the groundbreaking Breathless, writer-director Jean-Luc Godard was an acknowledged leader of the French New Wave. Entering his most prolific period, he produced one of his most ambitious and unusual films, a science-fiction comedy-thriller whose full title was Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution. The character of Caution (Eddie Constantine) was familiar to French audiences as the action hero of a series of films. In Godard's script, Caution is pitted against a computer named Alpha 60 that runs a futuristic totalitarian state. Shot in a bizarrely transformed Paris without the use of special effects, Alphaville is both disturbing and entertaining, full of Godard's anarchic challenges to conventional cinematic technique, yet recognizable as part of the genre of dystopian portraits of the future that includes 1984 and Brave New World. Godard's nightmarish future includes whimsical touches of absurdist terror, such as capital punishment carried out as a sporting event in a pool. The movie combines elements of film noir, science fiction, and political satire to create a distinctive and unorthodox tableau of the future.