Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

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7 February Eye is closed

poster Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1965)

still from Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1965)

still Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Jean-Luc Godard, FR/IT 1965)

Eye Filmmuseum seen across the river IJ © Marcus Koppen

Eye Filmmuseum, © Marcus Koppen

still from Week-end (Weekend) (Jean-Luc Godard, FR 1967)

still Week-end (Weekend) (Jean-Luc Godard, FR 1967)

still from À bout de souffle (Breathless) (Jean-Luc Godard, FR 1960)

still À bout de souffle (Breathless) (Jean-Luc Godard, FR 1960)

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Parisians get into their cars en masse at the weekend to drive out to 'la campagne', resulting in traffic chaos, wildness, cannibalism and many other forms of bourgeois bankruptcy. Apocalyptic, anarchic satire about deadlocked consumer society.

Week-end is a satire full of cultural quotations, which itself then became a major icon of the bankruptcy of a childish and ruthless form of capitalism that believes 'big is best, and quantity is quality'. The scene for which cameraman Raoul Coutard laid 300 metres of rails is justly famous: an endlessly tooting congested jam of cars carrying people being eaten up by boredom and frustration.

Week-end

exclusiveScreeningsInEye

In the future the people of Alphaville are controlled by the master computer brain Alpha 60. The creator of Alpha 60, Professor von Braun, plans to reduce mankind to a docile workforce, but secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives to put things right.

Screening to mark the passing of Jean-Luc Godard on 13 September 2022. Godard’s pastiche of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is regarded as a unique dystopian mix of SF, film noir, spy story and cultural criticism. Godard, A great fan of genre films, had seen actor Eddie Constantine star in the 1950's Lemmy Caution films. Constantine played a hard boiled detective with a stoic-melancholy expression; quick to fight, with a neverending thirst and a huge sense of irony.
 Super computer Constantine seemed the ideal lead for his pastiche on the concept of the totalitarian technopolist: intergalactic private eye Lemmy Caution opposes the evil genius Von Braun. The latter's beautiful, yet brainwashed daughter Natasja (Anna Karina) is there to help Caution unravel the secrets of the super computer Alpha 60 to free humanity from enslavement.

Godard’s À bout de souffle upended cinematic dogma. His homage to American, 1940’s gangster films and Paris is a milestone in film history thanks to his visual storytelling as well as the use of the jump cut and jazz.

Screening to mark the death of Jean-Luc Godard on 13 September 2022. Godard’s first feature-length film attracted international attention thanks to the uninhibited acting of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. À bout de souffle, based on François Truffaut’s idea, was the manifesto of the nouvelle vague. The handheld camera follows Patricia (Seberg) a salesperson for the New York Herald Tribune who casually engages with the advances of fugitive car thief Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Poiccard falls in love, Patricia betrays him to the police and he dies breathlessly in the streets of Paris.
"À bout de souffle was the sort of film where anything goes: that was what it was all about. Anything people did could be integrated in the film. As a matter of fact, this was my starting-point. I said to myself: we have already had Bresson, we have just had Hiroshima mon amour, a certain kind of cinema has just drawn to a close, maybe ended, so let’s add the finishing touch, let’s show that anything goes."
Screening of the 4K restoration preceded by a number of special Godard excerpts.

À bout de souffle

Introduced by film journalist Dana Linssen.

show for: 790718 2022-09-26 19:00:00

Introduced by Leo van Hee (programmer Eye)

Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

Jean-Luc Godard / FR, IT, 1965 / 98 min.

In the future the people of Alphaville are controlled by the master computer brain Alpha 60. The creator of Alpha 60, Professor von Braun, plans to reduce mankind to a docile workforce, but secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) arrives to put things right.

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Week-end

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