Thursday, February 09, 2006

Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution and Anna Karina as Natasha Von Braun in 'Alphaville'
Alpha-60: You have come from the Outlands. How did you feel as you crossed the galactic spaces?
Lemmy Caution: The silence of the bleak infinite space awed me.
Alpha-60: What is the privilege of the dead?
Lemmy Caution: Never to die.
Alpha-60: Do you know what transforms the night into day?
Lemmy Caution: Poetry.
Alpha-60: What is your religion?
Lemmy Caution: I believe in the imperative of the conscience.
Alpha-60: Do you see a difference between the quality of knowledge and the mystery of love?
Lemmy Caution: I believe on the contrary that there is no mystery of love.
Alpha-60: You are not telling the truth.
Lemmy Caution: I don't understand.
Alpha-60: You are concealing something.
Lemmy Caution: I admit that I might have reason to lie. But how can you differentiate between a lie and the truth?

Man versus machine in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Alphaville' (1965)