During the waves of police brutality protests that rolled across the nation this last half-year, there were any number of arresting images: protestors pouring milk in their eyes to counteract the tear gas used to disperse crowds; a highway patrolman leading a peaceful march alongside protestors; another officer pointing his rifle into a cameraman’s lens. Yet for all the high emotion and potential violence in many of those moments, it is a quieter, more chilling photo that has stayed with me most.
It was captured during the Mall of America protest in Minnesota, at which thousands of people clogged the shopping center’s arteries during the height of the shopping season. In an attempt to deter the congregating crowds, the mall used massive electronic billboard to broadcast all-caps statements like “THIS DEMONSTRATION IS NOT AUTHORIZED” and “THIS IS A FINAL WARNING.” The threats of arrest didn’t quell the crowd — which was a peaceful gathering to begin with — but it was a real-world reminder that the police-state futures imagined by some popular dystopian sci-fi writers are a heck of a lot closer than we sometimes think.
That image was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that Jean-Luc Godard’s wonderful film Alphaville would be coming to Amherst Cinema as part of a series celebrating the French director’s work. His earlier film Breathless gets most of the plaudits (perhaps deservedly so) but Alphaville is in many ways more of a film for film-lovers. Its unique mix of genres and atmospheres — gumshoe story with near-future sci-fi; German expressionism and American film noir — is a playful mix of high and low that feels as fresh today as it did almost 50 years ago.
Expat actor Eddie Constantine stars as the private detective with the cool name Lemmy Caution. He travels to the futuristic city of Alphaville on a secret mission to destroy the Alpha 60, a sentient supercomputer that rules over an increasingly docile state. As he tries to track its creator to ground, he falls for the inventor’s daughter Natacha (Godard regular Anna Karina), who has herself begun to lose her sense of individuality while living under Alpha 60.
A big part of what keeps Godard’s film feeling up to date is that he dispenses with the usual tropes of sci-fi; instead of weird and dated sets and special effects, the director chose to shoot on location in Paris, mostly at night, using the modernist buildings of the day as signals of the future. Caution wears the trench coat common to detectives everywhere, and when he rumbles into town it isn’t in a hovercar but an old Ford. See it today (it plays at Amherst on Sunday at 2 p.m. and Tuesday at 7 p.m.) and ask yourself if Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet or Planet of the Vampires — both also from ’65 — have held up so well. And then hope that Godard’s vision of the future is still just that: in the future.
Also this week: Amherst continues its Saturday morning Family Films Series with The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a 1926 work often called the first full-length animated film. Taking its story from the Arabian Nights, Achmed’s tale is one filled with flying horses, sorcerers, demons, and at least one princess. To tell it, director Lotte Reiniger uses a mesmerizing technique of silhouette animation, cutting figures out of cardboard and lead sheeting to be used in stop-motion film capture. The result, paired with restored color tinting and a new orchestral recording of Wolfgang Zeller’s 1926 score, is a fascinating film for young and old alike, as well as for anyone interested in the process of early filmmaking.
And just down the road at the Yiddish Book Center, Erik Greenberg Anjou’s documentary The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground will screen at 2 p.m. Sunday. The end result of a four-year journey that put the director in close contact with the band, it provides an intimate look at an unusual band of musicmakers.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com
