I’ve posted before about The Godard Project that a group of Regina artists and arts groups have joined forces to organize to commemorate the 80th birthday of French film legend Jean-Luc Godard. Tonight at Neutral Ground (1822 Scarth) at 8 p.m., a multi-media performance is being held that takes its inspiration from Godard’s 1965 dystopian science-fiction flick Alphaville.
Although set in the distant future on an unknown planet, the film was actually shot by Godard on the streets of Paris, and includes references to events from recent Terran history, so there is a neat conflation between his imagined society and France in the mid-60s.
The former is a technocratic dictatorship run by an all-powerful computer that the central character, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent named Lemmy Caution, must outwit to complete his mission to find a missing colleague and eliminate the society’s founder — a professor named von Braun.
Created by filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, visual artist Edward Poitras and dance artist Robin Poitras, A Weekend in Alphaville has a similar SF vibe. It too is set in a future fascist society, and has as its initial premise a collision between an organic car and a mechanical deer which dislodges the latter’s spirit from its body.
Tix are $10 at the door. For more info call 522-7166. And to close, here’s the trailer for Alphaville.