Artist-Curated Film Series: Alphaville (1965)
Still from Alphaville, 1965. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. 1h 39min. Courtesy of Rialto Pictures.
People have become slaves of probabilities.
— Lemmy Caution
Sometime in the near future, Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon) has outlawed emotions and built a mass-surveillance supercomputer to monitor the citizens of Alphaville and has enlisted synchronized female death squads to do his bidding. Under the cloak of darkness and a cascading crescendo of brass horns, world-weary secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) ventures into Alphaville on a mission: to find rogue agent Henri Dickson (Akim Tamiroff) and assassinate Professor von Braun. In this absurd interpretation of a totalitarian technocracy, Godard anchors Alphaville in the struggle against dehumanization in a society ruled by faceless computers.
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard / 1h 39min
About the Program
For the Visual Art Center’s first artist-curated film series, Maria Antelman selected three science-fiction movies that deal with evolving perceptions of power, authority, and free will and reflect on the various ways in which technology shapes our social, emotional, and political realities.
Screening Schedule
All screenings at 5:30 PM in Art Bldg, Rm 1.102. Light refreshments served.
October 24 — Alphaville (1965), directed by Jean-Luc Godard
November 21 — Stalker (1979), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
December 5 — Videodrome (1983), directed by David Cronenberg