After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eddie Constantine returns as the Alphaville agent Lemmy Caution, now the “last spy of the Cold War,” stranded in East Germany. He travels across a freshly reunified Germany, wandering among industrial ruins, historical sites, and phantoms of the image. Godard fuses the espionage film, the road movie, and the visual essay, interrogating history through quotations from literature, music, and cinema.
Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022), the French-Swiss film director, was a critic for Cahiers du cinéma in his early years before becoming a central figure of the French New Wave. After May 1968, he turned to political cinema and then, with his wife Anne-Marie Miéville, to experiments in video and television. In the 1980s he returned to the mainstream film industry; in his late work — Histoire(s) du cinéma, In Praise of Love, The Image Book — he developed a distinctive form of the visual essay.
