An inventive mixture of science fiction and film noir, with its roots in the surrealist poetry of the 1920s (specifically Paul Eluard’s ‘City of Pain’), Alphaville was inventively film on pre-existing locations in central Paris. B-movie icon Eddie Constantine (‘a solid block’, according to Godard) plays Lemmy Caution, a secret agent sent to overthrow the rule of Professor Von Braun, a scientist who invented the Alpha-60 computer. En route, he meets the professor’s daughter (Karina), who is incapable of loving and learns about the subject by studying Eluard’s writings. Combining the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the comic-strip legend of Dick Tracy, Godard has great fun playing with genre conventions while continuing to explore the relationships between sound and image, love and society.
France, 1965. English subtitles. Black and white. 98 min.

ANNA KARINA
A special guest at this year’s CineFrance, Anna Karina is best known to lovers of French cinema for her work with Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s, three examples of which will be shown in the festival. They were married for six years, and in many ways the films they made together appear to map out the paths they followed throughout their relationship, with Karina injecting emotion into the director’s intellectual framework. In films like Vivre sa vie, Alphaville and Pierrot le fou, Karina’s radiant self-sufficiency made for one of the most memorable portraits of a woman in French cinema of the ’60s. ‘Karina is always Anna, the ‘New Wave Bride’,’ wrote Roland-François Lack, ‘the model discovered, married and transformed into a star by Godard. He also made her an actress, and in each of their seven films elicited performances that were at once different and perfect.’
Born in Copenhagen, Karina had appeared in a couple of Danish shorts before she left home for Paris at the age of 17. She worked in commercials and as a model before meeting Godard. In fact, she turned down the female lead in À bout de souffle (Breathless) before taking up Godard’s second offer of a role in Le petit soldat in 1960. She also worked extensively for other directors during her time with Godard, and received great acclaim for her role in Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966). After the split with Godard, Karina appeared in a wide range of international films and tried her hand at directing with Vivre ensemble (Living Together) in 1973.