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Alphaville (The Criterion Collection)

Eddie Constantine (Actor), Anna Karina (Actor), Jean-Luc Godard (Director, Writer) Rated:
Unrated
Format: DVD
4.1 out of 5 stars 94 customer reviews
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Godard's irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to kill the inventor of fascist computer Alpha 60. Criterion's edition of this seminal film features a new digital transfer.

Amazon.com

As the French New Wave was reaching its maturity and filmgoing had evolved as a favorite pastime of intellectuals and urban sophisticates, along came Jean-Luc Godard to shake up every convention and send highfalutin critics scrambling to their typewriters. 1965's Alphaville is a perfect example of Godard's willingness to disrupt expectation, combine genres, and comment on movies while making sociopolitical statements that inspired doctoral theses and left a majority of viewers mystified. Part science fiction and part hard-boiled detective yarn, Alphaville presents a futuristic scenario using the most modern and impersonal architecture that Godard could find in mid-'60s Paris. A haggard private eye (Eddie Constantine) is sent to an ultramodern city run by a master computer, where his mission is to locate and rescue a scientist who is trapped there. As the story unfolds on Godard's strictly low-budget terms, the movie tackles a variety of topics such as the dehumanizing effect of technology, willful suppression of personality, saturation of commercial products, and, of course, the constant recollection of previous films through Godard's carefully chosen images. For most people Alphaville, like many of the director's films, will prove utterly baffling. For those inclined to dig deeper into Godard's artistic intentions, the words of critic Andrew Sarris (quoted from an essay that accompanies the Criterion Collection DVD) will ring true: "To understand and appreciate Alphaville is to understand Godard, and vice versa." --Jeff Shannon

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Special Features

None.

Product Details

  • Actors: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff, Valérie Boisgel, Jean-Louis Comolli
  • Directors: Jean-Luc Godard
  • Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Éluard
  • Producers: André Michelin
  • Format: Black & White, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
  • Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Rated:
    Unrated
    Not Rated
  • Studio: Criterion
  • DVD Release Date: October 27, 1998
  • Run Time: 99 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: 0780021541
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #116,073 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
  • Learn more about "Alphaville (The Criterion Collection)" on IMDb

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsGreat Restoration of a Strange Wonder from Godard
By Arthur Mortensen on August 12, 2016
Format: DVD Verified Purchase
This1965 Jean-Luc Godard film is a weirdly delightful science fiction story from one of France's most overtly political filmmakers. In a future world that would have been foreboding then (but is now a paradigm of the past world of main frame dominance of computing) the story is actually rather funny now. The inimitable Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, the embodiment of a 60's French detective -- tough, harsh, loud, violent and relentlessly inexpressive -- is out to assassinate the designer of a computer system that dominates the lives of a future that looks a lot like the world of 1965. Caution's primary mission is to rescue the designer's daughter, another scientist, played by Anna Karenina in one of the strangest films she ever worked in. Glass skyscrapers, terrible traffic, ghastly fluorescent light everywhere, smoky and noisy cars -- inside and out, like the great Greg Bear, Godard finds the best science fiction setting by projecting out from his own world. And that future was one of total central control with a few humanist outliers in a rear guard action. Godard's film is perfectly consistent with this. Every activity is dominated by a constantly lecturing super computer called Alpha 60. A few rebel humanists survive, wonderfully represented by Akim Tamiroff as he dies in a desolate apartment well away from the world of Godard's today.

As the detective hunts, his unrelenting decisiveness, which includes several shootings taken without warning or dialogue, Alpha 60 begins to fail, setting off one of the film's great sequences, where people (the user community?) start to fall apart themselves.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starsA Real “Killer” B Movie (one of 237!)
By D. Scott Apel on February 7, 2015
Format: Amazon Video Verified Purchase
This review is an excerpt from my book “Killer B’s: The 237 Best Movies On Video You’ve (Probably) Never Seen,” which is available as an ebook on Amazon. If you enjoy this review, there are 236 more like it in the book (plus a whole lot more). Check it out!

ALPHAVILLE: Under cover as “Ivan Johnson,” reporter for Figaro-Pravda, supertough secret agent Lemmy Caution (Constantine) drives his Ford Galaxy through intersidereal space into Alphaville, the City of Science. His mission: Locate Leonard Vonbraun (formerly Prof. Nosferatu), founder of Alphaville, and bring him back—or liquidate him.

Lemmy discovers that Alphaville is a fascist utopia where the denizens have lost all sense of feeling and live like emotionless robots; where a new “Bible” (i.e., dictionary) is issued daily, always with the omission of new forbidden words, like “conscience” and “tenderness”; a “galaxy” of its own, where Yes means No and where no one says “Why?”; a city where one either “adapts” or is executed; where a man can be condemned to death for acting illogically—like crying when his wife dies. It is a totalitarian technocracy ruled by the dispassionately logical Alpha 60, the “dreadfully unique” most powerful computer ever assembled. And Prof. Vonbraun created it all.

Complicating his mission, Caution finds himself falling in love with Natasha Vonbraun (Karina), the Professor’s delicate and beautiful daughter; a “pretty sphinx” who might yet be saved from the soulless city. Lemmy discovers that Alphaville plans an attack on The Outlands before they destroy its logical perfection. Can Lemmy complete his mission and rescue the human race—and Natasha—before Alpha 60 destroys them all?Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsAn entertaing Jean-Luc Godard sci-fi film..but minus a star for a barebones Criterion release
By [KNDY] Dennis A. Amith TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on November 16, 2009
Format: DVD Verified Purchase
From world renown director Jean-Luc Goddard ("Breathless", "Pierrot Le Fou", "Masculin, feminin", "Two or Thre Things I Know About Her"), one of the founding members of the French New Wave came the 1965 sci-fi film known as "alphaville" (Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution). Alphaville is a city from another world in which a supercomputer known as Alpha 60 is a dictator in control of the people and the area as it is a film that is a precursor to "big brother cameras" and technology of today. In this city, people must obey the rules as free thought, love, poetry and emotions are eliminated.

In fact, the world of Alphaville is quite interesting because rules include people not allowed to use the word "why" and replace it with the word "because", a bible is kept in each hotel room (which is more or less a dictionary with updated words of not to say) and anyone found breaking these rules will be executed. So, due to the power of Alpha 60, the people of alphaville have been reconditioned and brainwashed.

Enter an agent from "The Outlands" (outside of Alphaville which is literally the city next to it but is called another universe) named Lemmy Caution (played by Eddie Constantine, "Europa", "The Long Good Friday", "Tokyo no Kyujitsu") who is given a mission: To find a missing agent named Henry Dickson and capture and kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun (played by Howard Vernon).

So, Lemmy infiltrates Alphaville posing as a journalist named Ivan Johnson from the outlands who works for the publication Figaro-Pravda in which he starts taking pictures of the people around Alphaville which doesn't provoke any reaction from the people at Alphaville (because emotion is not supposed to be displayed by those who live there).Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsI am so happy to see it available on streaming media

One of my top 10 movies of all time. Silly and yet profoundly serious. Simply genius. I am so happy to see it available on streaming media!

Published 2 months ago by Alicia Grega
5.0 out of 5 starsWe are letting our machines becoming too smart for us

Our computers run us today, and I found this sci-fi film to be sci-truth. We are letting our machines becoming too smart for us. Great,scary and prophetic film.

Published 8 months ago by David Kersul
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Enjoyed it.

Published 8 months ago by Jill McCleary
1.0 out of 5 starsI expected cheesy sci-fi, but the whole premise of the movie fell...

I expected cheesy sci-fi, but the whole premise of the movie fell flat. The only reason I even had an inkling of what was going on was because I read the Wikipedia plot. Read more

Published 11 months ago by Paul A. Sproul
5.0 out of 5 starsFifty years later, this is the only Godard film ...

Fifty years later, this is the only Godard film that holds up for me, except for maybe Masculin Feminin. Read more

Published 12 months ago by Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent movie. Obvious parallels to Blade Runner

Excellent movie. Obvious parallels to Blade Runner, Matrix, and the like.

Published 13 months ago by PAT1109FA
5.0 out of 5 starsYour favorite electronica artist is probably in love with it.

Alphaville is a sci-fi detective story, a kind of proto-Blade Runner, with French New Wave charm (the kind which makes your favorite electronica artist probably be in love with... Read more

Published 15 months ago by rbrogan3
4.0 out of 5 starsI'm just adding format information for the streaming version because...

I'm just adding format information for the streaming version because Amazon doesn't include it in their descriptions. This is in the same 1. Read more

Published 16 months ago by intangible fancy
1.0 out of 5 starshas poor viewing quality

Viewer be aware/.. this movie is in English subtitles, has poor viewing quality, and not a good representation of the theorized story.

Published 17 months ago by VinnyNY
5.0 out of 5 starsOne of a kind film.

A great example of how to make an interesting, funny, movie with a small budget. Not Sci-FI in the summer blockbuster CGI way, but Wacky Sci-Fi in the original sense of the phrase,... Read more

Published 17 months ago by (L)SD

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