Film D 39;aventure
Emelia Lute
Alphaville: une trange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965 French New Wave science fiction neo-noir film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon, and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.[1][2]
Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special props or futuristic sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (which in 1965 were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. The film is set in the future but the characters also refer to twentieth-century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British crime novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth-century setting and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.
Lemmy Caution is a secret agent with the code number of 003 from "the Outlands". Entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie,[3] he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson and claims to work for the Figaro-Pravda. Caution is on a series of missions. First, he searches for the missing agent Henri Dickson; second, he is to capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun; lastly, he aims to destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun, portrayed using an actual Bull Gamma 60 computer in the movie,[4] which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.
Alpha 60 has outlawed free thought and individualist concepts like love, poetry, and emotion in the city, replacing them with contradictory concepts or eliminating them altogether. One of Alpha 60's dictates is that "people should not ask 'why', but only say 'because'". People who show signs of emotion are presumed to be acting illogically and are executed. There is a dictionary in every hotel room that is continuously updated when words that are deemed to evoke emotion become banned. As a result, Alphaville is an inhuman, alienated society.
As an archetypal American antihero private eye, in trenchcoat and with weathered visage, Lemmy Caution's old-fashioned machismo conflicts with the puritanical computer. The opposition of his role to logic (and that of other dissidents to the regime) is represented by faux quotations from Capitale de la douleur ("Capital of Pain"), a book of poems by Paul luard.
Caution meets Dickson, who soon dies in the process of making love to a "Seductress Third Class". Caution then enlists the assistance of Natacha von Braun, a programmer of Alpha 60 and daughter of Professor von Braun. Natacha is a citizen of Alphaville and, when questioned, says that she does not know the meaning of "love" or "conscience". Caution falls in love with her, and his love introduces emotion and unpredictability into the city. Natacha discovers, with the help of Lemmy Caution, that she was actually born outside Alphaville.
Professor von Braun was originally known as Leonard Nosferatu, but Caution is repeatedly told that Nosferatu no longer exists. The Professor himself talks infrequently, referring only vaguely to his hatred for journalists, and offering Caution the chance to join Alphaville, even going so far as to offer him the opportunity to rule a galaxy. When he refuses Caution's offer to go back to "the outlands", Caution kills him.
Alpha 60 converses with Lemmy Caution several times, and its mechanically-produced voice is seemingly ever-present in the city. Caution eventually destroys or incapacitates it by telling it a riddle that involves something that Alpha 60 cannot comprehend: poetry. The concept of the individual self has been lost to the collectivized citizens of Alphaville, and this is the key to Caution's riddle.
Despite its futuristic scenario, Alphaville was filmed entirely in and around Paris and no special sets or props were constructed. Buildings used were the Electricity Board building for the Alpha 60 computer centre and the Hotel Scribe.[6]
The opening section of the film includes an unedited sequence that depicts Caution walking into his hotel, checking in, riding an elevator and being taken through various corridors to his room. According to cinematographer Raoul Coutard, he and Godard shot this section as a continuous four-minute take. Part of this sequence shows Caution riding an elevator up to his room, which was achieved thanks to the fact that the hotel used as the location had two glass-walled elevators side by side, allowing the camera operator to ride in one lift while filming Constantine riding the other car through the glass between the two. However, as Coutard recalled, this required multiple takes, since the elevators were old and in practice they proved very difficult to synchronize.[7]
Like most of Godard's films, the performances and dialogue in Alphaville were substantially improvised. Assistant director Charles Bitsch recalled that, even when production commenced, he had no idea what Godard was planning to do. Godard's first act was to ask Bitsch to write a screenplay, saying that producer Michelin had been pestering him for a script because he needed it to help him raise finance from backers in Germany (where Constantine was popular). Bitsch protested that he had never read a Lemmy Caution book, but Godard simply said "Read one and then write it." Bitsch read a Caution book, then wrote a 30-page treatment and brought it to Godard, who said "OK, fine" and took it without even looking at it. It was then given to Michelin, who was pleased with the result, and the "script" was duly translated into German and sent off to the backers. In fact, none of it even reached the screen and according to Bitsch the German backers later asked Michelin to repay the money when they saw the completed film.[7]
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Alphaville received an approval rating of 91% based on 46 reviews, and an average rating of 8.36/10. Its consensus reads, "While Alphaville is by no means a conventional sci-fi film, Jean-Luc Godard creates a witty, noir-ish future all his own."[20] Time Out London gave the film a positive review, calling it "a dazzling amalgam of film noir and science fiction".[21]
L'aventure, c'est l'aventure is a 1972 French film directed by Claude Lelouch. Starring Lino Ventura and popular singers Jacques Brel and Johnny Hallyday, it recounts the adventures of five criminals who progress from conventional urban crime to international notoriety as celebrity kidnappers. The film was screened at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, but wasn't entered into the main competition.[1][2][3]
In Paris in 1972, a group of five career criminals realise that the rewards from their traditional way of life are shrinking in the modern world. Lino, for example, finds that his prostitutes want to be independent entrepreneurs recognised by the state. Jacques accepts that his bank robberies yield a low net return for high risks. After much discussion, the five settle on celebrity kidnaps. Their first target is the singer Johnny Hallyday, who is delighted at the publicity and himself writes them a huge ransom cheque.
Decamping with the proceeds to Latin America, they are hired by left-wing guerillas to kidnap the Swiss ambassador. The government agree to free twenty imprisoned revolutionaries in exchange for his release. When Ernesto, leader of the rebels, refuses to pay the kidnappers' fee, they kidnap him and sell his freedom for cash to three separate buyers; his soldiers, the government, and the CIA.
The gang decamp with the proceeds to the USA, where they hijack a 747 and return it for a fee in millions. Taking a holiday break on a yacht, they are hailed by five beauties in a speedboat. When the couples have paired off, Ernesto's soldiers scramble aboard. Under torture, the five men tell him how to access their Swiss bank account. Once he has their money, he hands them over to the French police, who put the five on trial.
Their defence lawyer craftily claims that the trial is political rather than criminal. Worried, the justice minister arranges for them to escape and fly out of the country. Landing in Africa, their skills are in immediate demand. The army is planning a coup on the day after the Pope arrives for a visit. The gang kidnap the Pope at the airport and demand that every Catholic in the world must contribute at least one dollar for his release.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Adle Blanc-Sec (French: Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adle Blanc-Sec), released as Adle: Rise of the Mummy in Malaysia and Singapore,[9] is a 2010 French fantasy adventure feature film written and directed by Luc Besson. It is loosely based on the comic book series The Extraordinary Adventures of Adle Blanc-Sec by Jacques Tardi and, as in the comic, follows the eponymous writer and a number of recurring side characters in a succession of far-fetched incidents in 1910s Paris and beyond, in this episode revolving around parapsychology and ultra-advanced Ancient Egyptian technology, which both pastiche and subvert adventure and speculative fiction of the period. The primarily live-action film, shot in Super 35, incorporates much use of computer animation to portray its fanciful elements and contemporary action film special and visual effects within the form of the older-style adventure films they have largely superseded.