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Screen and Surface, Soft and Hard: |
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López
In early 2013, the French director Leos Carax sent
a short but pungent audio message to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association,
to be played in his absence at their annual ceremony, when he was awarded “Best
Foreign Language Film” of 2012 for Holy
Motors.
So, I’m Leos Carax, director of foreign-language
films. I’ve been making foreign-language films all my life. Foreign-language
films are made all over the world, of course, except in America. In America,
they only make non-foreign-language films. Foreign-language films are very hard
to make, obviously, because you have to invent a foreign language, instead of
using the usual language. But the truth is, cinema is a foreign language, a language created for those who need to
travel to the other side of life. Good night. (1)
The World Cinema politics of this wonderful statement
by Carax are impeccable; however, what is most inspiring here is Carax’s
fascinating remark about cinema being “a foreign
language, a language created for those who need to travel to the other side of
life”.
The need to travel to the other side, a fantastic voyage, a journey through Alice’s
looking-glass … or to break on through to the other side, like Jim Morrison and
The Doors. It is seductive, on a first experience of Carax’s films, to tie them
to this romantic, surrealistic vision of overcoming, transcendence, magical
fusion and transformation. There is much in his films, especially in Les Amants du
Pont-Neuf (1991), which corresponds to this type of hallucinatory
metamorphosis, an experience which cinema can give us so well – a divine transport.
Think of Denis Lavant (Carax’s favourite actor) in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, a film that Serge Daney described as a sensorium, a
house for the senses: as his character Alex pilots a fast motor boat along the
Seine in Paris, he looks not forwards, ahead of him, but backwards – and then
he crashes through a great wall of water: it is a moment of strong release that
makes you jump in your cinema seat. Or, in Pola
X (1999), the long journey on foot by Guillaume Depardieu and Katerina
Golubeva into a dark, nocturnal forest – and thus into a whole new life.
Or the appearances and disappearances of the anarchic,
animalistic Merde, in and out of sewer drain openings, in the anthology film Tokyo! (2008), and then again in Holy Motors – always accompanied by the
violent sound of crows. Or how, at the beginning of Holy Motors, Carax himself, suddenly with a metamorphosed
finger-key (Cronenberg-style), takes us through a door, along a corridor, and
into a secret cinema … Passages, corridors, entranceways everywhere. Are they
doorways to a magical realm, an alternate universe?
However, the more we look at these films, we intuit a
different, rather darker logic in them – a logic that finds its culmination in Holy Motors, a movie that manages (like
much of Carax’s work) to be both bleak (as a testament, a kind of seismograph)
and exhilarating (as a sensory and narrative experience) – at exactly the same
time. It is this deep, poetic logic of Carax’s cinema that we seek here.
The inaugural image of Carax’s first feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), is mysterious,
ambiguous, rather indiscernible, and without sound. It is an image –
experimental in nature – on which we will see many variations throughout his
oeuvre. It could be lights: distant lights of a city, or along the bank of the
Seine as seen from the water and reflected, dancing there; or lights from a
fairground, a technological exposition … These are the kinds of examples that
eventually take identifiable shape and form along the narratives of his films.
But the chain of images begins from this initial, abstract presentation of a
luminous form. It could also be stars in the sky: another obsessive, fixation
image for Carax. Maybe it is an image of Unidentified Flying Objects, alien
spaceships in the night sky: several films, Mauvais
sang (Bad Blood, 1986) and Holy Motors, come quite close, after
all, to being pure science fiction.
Whether the image conjures lights, stars or UFOs,
these points of light must be far away – far from the camera-eye; far from the
onlooker inside the fiction; and far from us, the cinema spectator who enters
this viewpoint.
But these emanating points of light are, most often,
not far away at all in Carax’s movies. They are dots on flat surfaces, images
on walls, in screens of various kinds – all of which are, usually, very close
by. But they do not form the kind of screen-wall that the philosopher-essayist
Vilém Flusser once wrote about – the flexible and permeable wall, welcoming our
projections and our stories; they are more like what he described as the hard,
Gothic wall, shutting us into our little, miserable lives and subjected
histories. (2)
Carax is obsessed with walls, and pictures stuck on
them, such as in the small Parisian apartments of Boy Meets Girl, the extravagantly painted lair of Marc (Michel
Piccoli) in Mauvais sang, or a café
in the same film. This is a pictorial trait derived from Jean-Luc Godard in the
1960s: one or two striking, cut-out images on an otherwise bare, white wall.
But these figures imprinted on walls do not, in fact, open up an alternative
reality, as for Alice in Wonderland. These screen-walls tend to mock us, just
as they mock the characters, because they block us. They lock people in, rather
than releasing them.
There are walls with stars at the start of Boy Meets Girl, framed next to a closed
door; and hotel wallpaper with forest trees at the start of Holy Motors, hiding a secret entrance.
Always a promise of depth, travel,
transport – met with the flatness of a two-dimensional image and a hard
object-support, such as bricks and mortar. Look for the cruel, artificial stars
which are imprinted all over the place in Carax: from the floor where Mireille
(Mireille Perrier) tap-dances in Boy
Meets Girl to the roof of the limousine that transports Mr Oscar (Lavant
again) in Holy Motors.
Walls are surfaces, and Carax is fixated on surfaces –
on their texture, their materiality, and the functions they adopt. He
constantly brings us back to the fabric of clothing, or a blanket filling with
blood, or a carpet. Indeed, that inaugural Boy
Meets Girl figure is most likely an abstracted, blurred image of Alex’s
coat, so central to the film on all levels. In a Children’s Magic Hour-type
segment of Mauvais sang, Alex
performs tricks and, in each close-up reverse shot, Anna (Juliette Binoche), as
his delighted spectator, has her face covered in a different colour and texture
of paper – green, yellow, red, grey. All of these surfaces, overlaid with
imagistic or pictorial attributes, are effectively dream-triggers, portals to
fantasy. Yet, as hard, unyielding surfaces, unlike Flusser’s idea of a wall in
the wind (such as a kite), Carax’s hard surfaces also mark a limit, a bar. And
physically coming up against a bar always hurts like hell in Carax – like in
the moment of Mauvais sang when Lise
(Julie Delpy) slams up against the shut glass of a train door after
unsuccessfully chasing Alex.
In Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Alex maintains
a constant struggle against all solid surfaces. In the opening sequence, Alex,
lying on the pavement, places a hand on his neck and pushes his head from left
to right, rubbing his forehead against the asphalt and making it bleed. Later,
in the middle of a frenzied dance with Michèle (Juliette Binoche), he stamps
his feet on the stone while fireworks explode in the sky, falling like dew
drops. Sometimes, this combat takes the form of a subtle challenge, such as
when our hero does acrobatic stunts on the bridge, or climbs the metro corridor
walls. But this effort by Alex to maintain an elastic, malleable body is always
an attempt, perhaps unconscious, to transcend the solidity of surfaces, the
impermeability of stone and steel: it is a cry of rebellion against everything
that oppresses him.
This poetic system is inverted, reinforced in a
different way, by Carax’s extensive use of glass, transparencies and reflective
surfaces. There are few mirrors of a conventionally dramaturgical sort: the
melodramatic mirrors of Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls or Todd Haynes. Carax’s
mirrors are not to see oneself in, to grasp a personal moment of destiny or change.
Glass in Carax functions, rather, as blockage or non-vision – especially
evident in Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais sang. Often, we find walls made
purely of glass, from floor to ceiling, far beyond a simple window-function. In
fact, windows in Carax are rarely used for looking through. In Boy Meets Girl, Mireille never sees,
notices, acknowledges or gestures to the lovers just right across the way,
through her glass wall; not even when she is dying there. Or, if characters do
look through windows, it is to gaze at a scene they can neither enter nor share
in. The vehicle, medium or support of vision – in this case, transparent glass
– again mocks and blocks these characters.
Vision – human sight which can never be turned off, which must receive
all inputs, and so many viewing-machines as optical prostheses (film, TV,
billboards, computer) – is a type of curse in Carax. Which is rather
paradoxical for an audiovisual medium like cinema – and this is, in fact, one
of the key paradoxes that drive his films. The paradox allows us to understand
why blindness, covered or obscured sight, often registers as an angelic,
floating state in his work, open to all possibilities – a motif we see in Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais sang and, more complexly, in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, where Alex tries, against common sense, to
keep Michèle in her state of encroaching blindness.
In Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, Carax creates a fascinating equivalence between liquid surfaces
(malleable, unformed) and Michèle’s defective vision, resulting in shots where
objects and faces lose their contours and become a smudged mixture of colour
and light. For Alex, it is precisely Michèle’s defective vision that allows the
possibility of the Utopian, liquid experience they share – whereas, for her, it
is only a torment to be endured, or (eventually) overcome.
Let us revert to the infernal, glassed world of
looking. Occasionally, in the anarchic spirit of contradiction or resistance,
we find smashed or broken glass in Carax – like the punched hole in a telephone
booth wall in Boy Meets Girl, or a
bullet through a spyglass in Les Amants
du Pont-Neuf – but still, the hard, Gothic system of the world stays in
place, quickly switches back to normal, despite the momentary interruption or
shake-up. This is precisely the plot of Holy
Motors: no matter what momentous drama of life and death that Mr Oscar
enacts and participates in, there is always, in the blink of an elliptical cut,
a return to routine, the schedule, the forward-moving limo, the make-up table
with its ever-mocking and accusing mirror that can only say to Oscar: back to work.
Or consider a striking, brutal juxtaposition at the
conclusion of the water-skiing scene in Les
Amants du Pont-Neuf: after Michèle topples over and
Alex dives into the water with her, for a few moments, we see two images
superimposed on screen: the water churned up by Alex’s dive, and the street
along which Michèle walks in the following scene. In this sudden transition
from one shot to another, in this extended lap-dissolve whose effect is less
fluid than a direct cut, the violent clash of different elements is perfectly
conveyed.
Can we take a broader aesthetic and cultural
perspective on this system of poetic motifs in Carax? The wellspring of both
the energy and despair in his films is a tension we can identify with modern
cinema itself, since at least the work of Michelangelo Antonioni: the tension
between flatness and depth, between two and three dimensions in the image – and
all that the image comes to express or allegorise through this interplay. This
is the tension between the image or picture as a plane, created by the camera that frames it; and the image as the
illusion of a world, an imaginary
space that invites us to enter it, join with it, dream with it.
It is a tension that haunts our contemporary era of
the digital, and that Carax addresses, ambivalently, in Holy Motors. Are our laptop images, our cell phone images (and so
on), flat surfaces or dream-portals? This question preoccupies Carax today; it
is condensed, in Holy Motors, in Mr
Oscar’s eerily beautiful nightmare image of the pixels on his limousine screen
coming apart, deranged.
Carax’s fixation on surfaces, walls and windows is
part of a deep, elaborate engagement with flatness. In cinema, this has a
special charge: when an image, withdraws, as it were, into frontality and
flatness, we are faced with the screen itself – the movie screen we are
watching – as a merely two-dimensional surface. And this also creates the
possibility of a drama or comedy of liberation: the liberation of image,
fiction and characters into the illusion of a three-dimensional, depth-charged
space.
In Carax, this movement is always going back and
forth; depth changes into flatness, flatness into depth. His quite particular
depiction of architecture and living spaces – a key aspect of his work – always
occurs on a continuum between spaces that are pictorially flattened, and then
suddenly, strikingly deep. Depth explodes, for instance, when the camera tracks
along the length of a corridor (Boy Meets
Girl), or of a highly artificially constructed, Jacques Demy-style street (Mauvais sang).
A sequence of Boy Meets Girl devoted to the Paris métro begins with a poster, the size of which we only
grasp when a small boy falls into the frame in front of it, trying to sneak
onto a train. And, there are sometimes completely obscure fragments of
environmental space that remain obscure, unless a character arrives to place
them, visually, into context and perspective (another Antonioni trait). There
is also a powerful play on edging:
the staging of a human action (sometimes involving death or near-death)
literally on a diagonal edge that confronts (for example) the hard world of concrete
with the fluid world of water – an opposition central to Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.
Attend to how Carax frames the Pont-Neuf itself, never in terms of
transit or access, but only as a limit: shots are composed to emphasise the line of stone
that cuts through images, forming diagonals or horizontals that bisect the
frame and split the screen into uneven halves. It is margin between land and
water, between the mundane, known land inhabited by the characters, and the
magical, aquatic universe of sea or river.
In a scene
devoted to Alex and Michèle’s beach adventure, an aerial angle, tracing a
pendular movement, takes us from sea waves to snowy landscape. The resulting
shot is strange, almost unreal; in it, the white of the foam and the snow are
confused; we can scarcely distinguish where one material mass ends and the
other begins.
In Carax, the all-important realm of interpersonal
intimacy – in his depiction, between man and woman – occasions a particularly
paroxysmic revolution of depth exploding from flatness. This is what happens in
the shot/reverse shot couplet of low and high that is so surprising in the
context of Mauvais sang. In both Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais sang, there are long sequences detailing (to use the title
of a Philippe Garrel film) the birth of love. In each case, the sequence begins
with the perfect distillation of Caraxian flatness: two people awkwardly
positioned next to one another, a wall close behind them, and some image or
design figure imprinted on the wall. At a certain point, as the emotional
atmosphere gets warmer and more intimate, Carax varies every possible stylistic
parameter – re-positioning of bodies, changes in the balance of light and
darkness, inventively deframed angles – to open up the space, refigure it,
banish flatness, and eventually work right around to a reversed, light-filled
angle on the scene.
In the 1980s, Carax was frequently associated with a
group of commercial French filmmakers to which he did not truly belong – the
glossy “cinema of the look” ushered in by Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva (1981). But if there is any useful
point to be derived from this yoking of Carax to a trend in popular
postmodernism, it is this: in Carax, we have gone far beyond a world in which
pristine, human individuals are confronted with a world of images or media.
They are not, as it were, full, rounded people in a flat world of images,
screens and surfaces. That is precisely not the problem.
Rather, flatness has gone inside individuals, it has been internalised; they become images and live as them. This
explains Carax’s sometimes absurdist taste for visual seriality: not just the
thousands of identical posters of Michèle across Paris in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, but also, more intimately, the dozens of
suburban houses designed exactly the same way at the end of Holy Motors, or the surreal image in Boy Meets Girl of the “baby room”, like
the discreet cloakroom at a party. All things (human and otherwise) take on the
quality and quantity of serially reproduced, mechanical images.
We are not terribly satisfied with accounts of Holy Motors that identify Carax’s
artistic stance as being anti digital culture or the computer age, because he
is (apparently) nostalgic: nostalgic
for the way movies used to be, how stars used to be, how art used to be. Yes,
you will hear Mr Oscar lament that cameras are getting so small in this digital
era that we can no longer see them – unlike the grand 35 millimetre cameras of
cinema’s past. And there is, indeed, an entire poetic system linking the holy
motors of the first, hand-cranked movie cameras – the ones that the
inventors-pioneers Muybridge and Marey used in the earliest days of the medium
– with the holy motors of the limousines, facing their obsolescence and
imminent junkyard retirement in a cruel, modern world. And lastly, in this
associative chain, the idea of the holy motor is linked to the internal engine
of the human body itself, with its primal forces of walking, running, grunting,
dancing, fucking – every kind of motion
performance it can give, unaided by technological prostheses.
But Holy Motors is itself a film shot digitally, and treated extensively with digital effects
in post-production. Its superb, hushed sound design can only have been done
with digital audio layering and mixing. The film laments the loss of one thing,
but embraces, enthusiastically, the arrival of another – and this is yet one
more paradox at its heart. If we look back to the start of Carax’s career, we
see in Boy Meets Girl the clear
celebration of a technological fantasia: lights blinking inside a pinball
machine that has been opened up for repair; or the symphony of pulsating lights
along a bank of photocopy machines, reflected in another full-length
wall-mirror. Always lights: mechanical and artificial, yes, but partaking of
that burst of energy that comes with modernism’s industrial revolution – a
revolution without which the cinema itself would not exist.
The immense fireworks in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf are the supreme embodiment of this dream;
there, they are linked to the creation and projection of fire around Lavant’s
own acrobatic, circus-performing, touchingly small body.
Carax’s project is, in this sense, to find ways to
continue that first jolt of artificial light in the new world. As he testified
in 1991, looking back at an era of popular music that was over by the time he
made it onto the scene: “It’s not nostalgia, it’s just the idea that one
arrives after something has happened. But on the other hand, the juice, the
electricity that this movement once had, I’ve always sought it out in life, in
cinema, in montage”. And Holy Motors is nothing if not, at all levels, a tremendous montage of 21st century elements.
We have pointed to Carax’s alter ego as someone always
sadly looking at what he cannot enter. This is the figure of the Stranger in
Paradise, like Wim Wenders’ angels during the first half of Wings of Desire (1987). When Carax gives himself a cameo, it is exactly in this role or
position, as we see in Mauvais sang.
And what the Carax hero mainly wants is love,
full romantic/sexual fusion with the woman he spies and adores.
However, in Holy
Motors – arriving after so many unmade projects for this great filmmaker,
in some sense digesting and summing them all up in a magnificent career gesture
– we have advanced to a much tougher stage. Whereas once the romantic agony of
Carax’s cinema hinged on the anxiety of whether love could stay the same, or
whether (and how) it should change, now there is a flatlining of time and
event. Mr Oscar is no longer outside or detached from scenes; he is precisely inside every scene, its centre, its
star, the person who makes things happen – without him, nothing could reach its
drama or epiphany. Mr Oscar is, in the words of Judith Revault D’Allones, the individual of the spectacle: the entire
society of the spectacle internalised, transformed into a sole person who
generates and performs it. (3)
But to be inside, at last, for the Carax hero, is no
fun: in fact, it is sheer, unending Hell, a truly Dantean vision. And there is
no longer any surrealistic fusion or transcendence awaiting him inside this
spectacle; no romantic couple on an island of two. There is only obligation, in
the form of the nuclear family unit – and with a different family each night,
no less. As Édith Scob (who plays Mr Oscar’s faithful chauffeur/minder Céline)
has drolly commented in an interview for the Australian art magazine Discipline: “Family life with the female
monkeys isn’t such a blast”. (4)
How does Carax film the final scene of homecoming in Holy Motors – which is surely one of his
greatest scenes? Precisely, once again, as
an image: the camera cranes up,
frames Oscar’s family through the window, backed by revolving, shocking-pink
disco lights. As spectators, we cannot enter, through the mobile camera eye,
the three-dimensional space of the home. And for Mr Oscar himself, it is surely
nothing more than an equally flat image that he must live out, a pose he must
adopt as husband and father at the window. Just as, in Pola X, the magnificent camera movement right up to a mansion’s
window is blocked at the point of entrance: the flat, forbidding image it
frames at the precipice.
The tension of the precipice, between the flat and the
deep, between the old and the new, between the melancholic outside and the
infernal inside: this is where the poetry of the cinema of Leos Carax, lyrical
and harsh, resides.
This material was first presented as an audiovisual
performance in Basel and Frankfurt during 2013. A shorter multi-media version
appeared in Spanish in Transit online that year, and a longer version was
published in German in the 2018 book Oberflächen und Interfaces; this new version synthesises the two. Some
of the material on Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is adapted from Cristina’s essay (in Spanish and English) “A Drama of
Water and Stone”, in Transit,
which was also the basis of this audiovisual
essay,
slightly altered (due to copyright) for inclusion on the 2017 Kino Lorber
DVD/Blu-ray edition of The Lovers on the Bridge. A subsequent audiovisual essay in our Thinking Machine series, Impending (2020), addresses the endings of Holy Motors and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961).
1. The audio of Carax’s speech can be found on YouTube here (accompanied by a video montage not made by him).
Accessed 12 August 2021.
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2. See Vilém Flusser, “Shelters, Screens and Tents”, in The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (London, Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 55-57. Our 2020 audiovisual essay based on this text can be found here. back
3. Judith Revault D’Allones, contribution to symposium
“Hail Holy Motors”, LOLA, no. 3 (2012).
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© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin October 2013 |
