Alphaville [Criterion Collection]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Alphaville comes to DVD with only one picture format option: full-screen standard (1.33:1 aspect ratio). The DVD is single-layered, and it contains only one audio/sound option as well: French Dolby Digital 1.0, with optional English subtitles. Although it is advertised as a collector's edition (perhaps it is a limited-release DVD version), it has no special or bonus features of any kind included. While the VHS version is "widescreen," it obtains this effect through cropping the picture; the DVD picture therefore shows even more than the VHS, and in better quality. Despite the minimal audio (mono-sounding throughout) and lack of bonus materials, the transfer quality is very good. ~ Craig Chalquist, All Movie Guide

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
• Audio: PCM Mono
• Screen: Black and White
• Subtitle: English
• Features:
  • [None specified]

AWARDS

• Berlin International Film Festival

•     Won Golden Bear - 1965

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2001

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Eddie Constantine - Lemmy Caution
       Anna Karina - Natasha Von Braun
       Akim Tamiroff - Henri Dickson
       Laszlo Szabo - Chief Engineer
       Howard Vernon - Professor Leonard Nosferatu / Von Braun

• Director:

  Jean-Luc Godard

• Producer:

  Andre Michelin

• Screenwriter:

  Jean-Luc Godard

• Cinematographer:

  Raoul Coutard

• Composer (Music Score):

  Paul Misraki

• Editor:

  Agnès Guillemot

REVIEW:

• In 1965, six years after his feature film debut with the groundbreaking Breathless, writer-director Jean-Luc Godard was an acknowledged leader of the French New Wave. Entering his most prolific period, he produced one of his most ambitious and unusual films, a science-fiction comedy-thriller whose full title was Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution. The character of Caution (Eddie Constantine) was familiar to French audiences as the action hero of a series of films. In Godard's script, Caution is pitted against a computer named Alpha 60 that runs a futuristic totalitarian state. Shot in a bizarrely transformed Paris without the use of special effects, Alphaville is both disturbing and entertaining, full of Godard's anarchic challenges to conventional cinematic technique, yet recognizable as part of the genre of dystopian portraits of the future that includes 1984 and Brave New World. Godard's nightmarish future includes whimsical touches of absurdist terror, such as capital punishment carried out as a sporting event in a pool. The movie combines elements of film noir, science fiction, and political satire to create a distinctive and unorthodox tableau of the future. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide

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