| |
Hail Holy Motors
Part Two: |
Unmasking
What is a mask? I do not know. I am walking down the
Viennese streets, observing the faces of the passers-by trying to find an
answer in their gaze. They stare back.
In my mind’s eye their looks turn into the
expressionless mask worn by Édith Scob in Holy
Motors and worn by her before, in her breakthrough role in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1960). A mask to
conceal and camouflage. To protect. To draw a porcelain veil between her guise
and the world’s.
Of course, the mask in Holy Motors is a direct reference to that poetic horror film,
although we have to reconsider the meaning of the horror. As it is not the
horror of the shock and the gore and the mad scientist using his scalpel. They
are already minimised by its equally terrifying, lyrical, dreamlike style. And
it’s not the horror of the thought that someone could love someone else so much
that they are prepared to cross the line between the ‘sane’ and the ‘in’, and
dive deep into in-sanity. But it is alarming enough. And is it really the
horror of love? Isn’t it the horror of shame and disgust and guilt and the
sense of inadequacy that we are never to restore what is lost? And loved.
I slip over an empty cookie wrapping. ‘Gefüllte
Herze’, it says. ‘Filled hearts’. And, as always, my lazy eye enjoys itself in
a misreading: ‘Gefühlte Herze’. ‘Felt hearts’. I guess that works, too.
The mask in Holy
Motors has become the face of the film. It is seen on posters and
production stills, it slowly slides over the nine lives and the eleven faces of
its protagonist and hero and the transforming wizardry of actor Denis Lavant
who is embodying them all. Holy Motors can be seen as a film about that. About acting and role-playing and the many
faces we wear in our daily lives and how these masquerades direct our actions.
How we are all fathers and bankers and killers and dying and begging to get our
alms out of life.
It is perhaps about incompetence, too, about the
inability that – amongst all these parts we perform in order to survive in a
society that is not so civilised but only cultivated by its rules – we are
never to be ourselves. And how sometimes we would rather hide behind a façade.
But who are we? And from whom are we hiding? Hence the quote from Jorge Luis
Borges’ short story ‘Everything and Nothing’ in the booklet accompanying the
film imagining a conversation between the playwright William Shakespeare and
God: ‘History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence
of God and told Him: “I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and
myself”’.
And why not call these roles, these characters, these
personae the dramaturgy of the everyday, as we are constantly making up stories
in the futile hope that they will make sense of the incidents that befall us?
And the interventions that we, just like Lavant’s Mr Oscar, are conducted to
perform in other people’s lives. And perhaps all these tell-tales are not so
useless, as we are enjoying these make-up lives too with a deep, sardonic
pleasure. And Holy Motors is also a
nod to that.
A persona is, in our everyday usage of the word, the
social role played by an actor. But aren’t we all merely players and all the
world a stage? More interesting in this context is the fact that the word
persona stems from the Latin where it originally referred to the theatrical
mask. The origins of the word mask are less clearly defined. They may be found
in the medieval Latin ‘masca’ that referred to ‘spectre’ or ‘nightmare’, but
the word may also be older and come from the Arabic ‘maskhara’ that means ‘to
ridicule’. And there are other sources. And older ones. And the mask itself, of
course, is even older than all that. It is found in the ancient Greek theatre
where actors wore oversized god masks to beseech the power of these gods, and
the life forces and sources they were playing with, and we find it in the
ritual context of non-western cultures where the mask performed an even more
magical role. It can be traced back to the first human being that hid his head
behind his hand and peeked through his fingers to see if the world was still
there.
So we’re wearing masks anyway. Whether we are wearing
them or not.
Our inborn expressions such as joy or fear or
amazement are our first masks. We use them to communicate. They have to be
identifiable.
They are like interfaces, a term I borrow from
computing to describe the interaction between the components that work in a
given system.
Despite its plea for the analogue, Holy Motors is also a digital film in
the way it uses discontinuous structures, such as the different incarnations of
the shape shifting Mr Oscar, as a metaphor for life. There is an indefinable
sense that all these discrete events may or may not be connected or
orchestrated by the mysterious Man with the Port-Wine Stain. But are they? Or
is he just watching and, like any film spectator, trying to reconstruct a
story? So maybe we should say that Holy
Motors is resisting this atomic concept of discontinuity. As, in the end,
the film is both. Both an exploration of continuity and of disconnection. That,
of course, aligns with the greater concept behind the film, that it is a
mourning song for the loss of Carax’s partner, Katerina Golubeva. As where else
are these matters of the chain of events (as life is often called) and its
sudden halt better understood than in the face of death?
Is the film a death mask?
The white stretch limos, the vehicles of our sublunary
endeavours, are the horseless carriages of the holy motors that keep our dreams
going.
‘My girl, my girl, where will you go? I’m going where
the cold wind blows.’
The mask as an interface thus establishes, ignites,
the interaction between the self and the world.
And, at the end of the day, when Scob’s Céline puts on her mask, it is not to obscure herself, but to show us her real face. The Bressonian real, the projection of the simulacra of emotions. The blank mirror that stares back. And all we see are eyes. Without a face. Heart-felt. |
Dana Linssen
|
Death Vessels in the Dark
So
far, I have experienced Holy Motors three times – the first time at
Locarno, the other two at home in Madrid – and, on each occasion, it has seemed
to me a different film (which is, of course, one of the reasons why I like it very
much). The first time (it was summer) I saw it as a descendant of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (1930), despite the more blatant
quotations from Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage; and therefore I
found it rather joyously surrealistic, also a bit crazy and funny like Pierre Prévert’s L’Affaire est dans le sac (1932); and
somewhat akin, in its episodic structure, to a program of Charlie Chaplin’s
early, more anarchic shorts. Along with Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), I think of these shorts as the prime
source for the behaviour, gestures, movements and
general appearance of Monsieur Merde’s ancestor, Opale (i.e., Mr Hyde), as
embodied by Jean-Louis Barrault in Jean Renoir’s Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959).
But
afterwards, in autumn or the early days of winter, back home, the film’s
initial joyfulness had fallen to a second level, replaced in the foreground by
a pervasive and persistent sadness and melancholy, a sort of longing and nostalgia
for things and people now vanished. After all, it is a movie dealing mainly
with death and, therefore, like every other Carax film so far (and, more guardedly, like most Nouvelle Vague films), in the
tradition of and under the protective cloak and candle lights of Jean Cocteau. I’m
thinking not only of the obvious, direct references — Le Sang d’un poète (1930), Orphée (1950) and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960) — but also the undercover ones,
That
Cocteau is not mentioned in the end credits of Holy Motors (which thank Henry James and Franju instead) may be either because Cocteau is not at all fashionable nowadays, or
rather (I hope) because Carax sees his indebtedness
to Cocteau as so self-evident that he feels no need to state it. In any case,
you may observe that all the milestones I have mentioned are either from the
1928-1935 period (which marks the end of silent films and the first years of
sound films in France) — you may also think, while watching Holy Motors, of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934), and of Renoir’s
How
does a filmmaker pass most of the time not making films, not filming? If he is
not too embittered, he watches (or re-watches) movies and thinks about them.
That does not turn him into a film historian, but drives him to watch films
historically – and eventually to make them by linking himself to one or many
traditions in the years before and after he started to make films.
There
are echoes of Louis Feuillade and Léonce Perret in Leos Carax as
much as of Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean
Eustache or Philippe Garrel. In addition to the
filmmakers I have already mentioned, there may also be, perhaps more deeply
buried, such figures as Alain Resnais, Jacques Tati, Jacques Becker, Jean Grémillon,
François Truffaut and Maurice Pialat.
Somehow,
the large windows of the very long white limousines seem to become screens on
which, with the help of music, we can dream new movies.
|
Miguel Marías |
The Beauty of the Act
While
re-watching the trailer for Holy Motors,
it froze on Lavant, hunched behind a mirror, at the back
of a limousine. Sitting, bald and shirtless, he is crowded by indistinct
detritus. The still, dark shot is lit only by the mirror’s globes and the neon
green that aches from the world outside. A single, static subtitle reads, ‘The
beauty of the act’ (la beauté du geste).
Here, the sense of story lingers: both menacing and enticing, it is felt, not
yet understood.
This
is the first time I have ever been grateful for my shoddy Internet connection.
In this instance, it fortuitously provided me with a crystalline moment that I
would have otherwise struggled to select. Not because such moments are hard to
come by in Holy Motors; rather,
because there are so many.
Holy Motors is a rich bounty for
the mind and an adventure for the heart. Directing attention solely to the
astonishing performances or the chaotic narrative structure would be at once
too expansive and too limiting. To concentrate on one specific element – the
masterful music, heightened colour, indirect tone or formal successes – is a
recipe for a thesis. A fluid and inspired creature, Holy Motors will be many things to many people; for me, it is
largely a feeling that is perfectly encapsulated by this frozen moment of
screen time.
Upon
viewing Holy Motors, a particular
sensation nestled itself somewhere in my chest, while sparkling in my wide
eyes. Still now, upon reflection, I can feel the same mixture of joyful
anticipation, respectful intrigue and immense wonder. During the film each
incident, pouring forth in a deliberate ode to imagination, inscribed an
infectious awe that wholly, loudly and defiantly lauded the ‘beauty of the
act’. Smitten by its splendour, I was and remain utterly enamoured with Holy Motors, a film that, in and of
itself, is enamoured with artistic expression.
The
true beauty of Holy Motors lies in
its ability to incite such an emotional reaction at the time of viewing and for
long after the event, even when the moving images are spliced and still. Holy Motors was a swoon-inducing fiction
feast; while I watched it with clasped hands and moon-eyes, it was not a purely
sterile, clean romance – a truth that only added to its potency.
The
path that Holy Motors led me down was
often murky, rough, violent and puzzling. But I never felt lost because, while
at times disorienting, it never became obtuse. The combination of an innocent,
childlike sense of imagination with elements of grand myth and art,
reappropriated into a fanciful, curious world, is truly a spectacle to behold.
As a love letter to cinema, Holy Motors seemed
personal in its celebration of story, music and performance; in essence, it was
a movie-length rumination on the beauty of the act. I felt it each step of the
way.
|
Stephanie Van Schilt |
A Couple
of Images
|
There’s
never any initial idea or intention behind a film, but rather a couple of
images and feelings that I splice together. (Carax, Holy Motors press kit)
What interests me is the sense, as you say, that ‘film is nothing but photography’; I think that is a contradictory and even a false way of looking at cinema, but I keep seeing it that way somehow. (Jeff Wall, The Crooked Path) |
In
several interviews, Carax describes how his films almost always begin with
images, rather than with a carefully planned and structured narrative. Eva
Mendes provides further evidence of the central place of the image in Carax’s
films when she explains (in Huffington Post) that the original script for Holy Motors was ‘formatted as descriptions of scenes with a lot of
photography around the descriptions’. While Holy Motors is a mercurial exploration
of performance and the transforming performing body, there are several scenes
that feature the making of images, thus inviting us to also consider the many
permutations and possibilities of the photographic/cinematic image.
In
Mr Oscar’s third assignment, he changes out of a motion capture outfit and transforms
into the sewer-living, Id-like figure of Merde – a character who first appeared
in Carax’s short in the portmanteau film Tokyo! (2008). Merde is a beast from the underworld, a troll-like leprechaun with
wild, red hair, a blind eye, unkempt long fingernails and toenails, dressed in a
green jacket and pants with no shirt and bare feet.
This assignment takes place in two locations, which can also be described
as two different spheres of image-making: one is above ground in Père Lachaise
Cemetery; the other is subterranean, in the sewer. This is a
Beauty-and-the-Beast story in which Merde kidnaps the supermodel (Mendes) and
carries her to his underground lair, recalling films such as Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) and
Cooper-Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933).
But there is something else going on here. Carax is staging and restaging
images. He is transforming locations into settings in which to stage a
photograph or a tableau vivant. It is
through such stagings that Carax invites us to reflect on the nature, meaning
and possibilities of images, both alone and as part of a cinematic flow.
In Père Lachaise, Merde crazily races around with no
respect to the sacred nature of the location or its visitors. He tramples the
crucifixes covering graves, grabbing flowers and wreaths (eating them as he
goes), and even knocks down a blind man. This anarchic behaviour leads him to a
fashion photo shoot where Harry T. Bone (Geoffrey Carey), a particularly uncool
photographer wearing white shorts and white ankle socks, is shooting Kay M – a
reference to Kate Moss, with whom Carax had planned a feature project condensed
in this vignette. Kay is standing still and silent, like a statue or goddess,
draped in gold silk and positioned against the backdrop of gravestones. Harry
uses a modern Canon 5D digital camera as he manically snaps away at a speed
matching Merde’s erratic walk. Amidst the rapid succession of flashes, and
transfixed by her vision and presence, Harry utters the word ‘beauty’ over and
over again.
Merde
disrupts the photo shoot, pushing spectators aside so he can stand in front and
watch. The photographer is immediately drawn to Merde’s strangeness, and swaps
his chanting of ‘beauty’ for the words ‘weird … so weird’. Harry asks his
assistant for his older Hasselblad film camera – a camera for artistic
photographs rather than compromised commercial fashion work – and starts
shooting this strange creature. Again, he repeatedly fires the shutter, manically,
as if he does not really see what is in front of his camera – before requesting
his assistant Jamie (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) to invite Merde to be photographed
with Kay. Jamie cautiously approaches and asks Merde if he knows Diane Arbus –
a photographer who, she says, photographed ‘dwarves, giants and monsters’ –
inviting him to stand alongside the model, to incarnate an image of Beauty and
the Beast. Instead of accepting this offer, Merde bites the assistant’s fingers
off, wipes the blood on Kay and then kidnaps her – carrying her over his
shoulder back down into the underground sewer. She is compliant, simply
allowing him to do this, while Harry and his other assistant follow, in pursuit
of yet another image.
This
scene evokes memories of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), where Thomas (David Hemmings), an incarnation of the 1960s fashion
photographer David Bailey, is contemptuous of the world of commercial
photography, particularly his lifeless (still) and mute (silent) models.
However, Thomas has aspirations to be a ‘serious’ photographer, and one of the
ways he seeks out ‘artistic images’ is to dress up as a homeless man to gain
entry into a dosshouse, where he secretly photographs less-fortunate men. These
documentary photographs (obtained through duplicitous means) of marginalised
people constitute what he believes is the real subject of photography. However,
these ideas become destabilised when an innocent photograph, taken in a
tranquil park, turns out to be a photograph of a murder. Suddenly, the
statement that Thomas thought the photograph conveyed becomes a question.
In
a similar way, Harry turns his attention from commercial work to a more
artistic approach to image-making. This, too, is replayed in the shift between
using a digital camera (for the fashion shoot) to using a medium-format film
camera for the ‘artistic’ work that is (again) a photograph of a weird-looking Arbus-style
subject. It is interesting to note that Arbus herself was a fashion
photographer before she chose a medium-format camera to photograph those
categorised by society as freaks. Yet, while Harry is a comic version of
Thomas, what he shares with his source: a first moment where he controls what
is in front of his camera; a second moment where he simply responds to the
chance encounters that are in front of him; and a third moment where he loses
all control, the image worlds he has staged simply disappearing.
From
William Todd Schultz’s 2011 book An
Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus: ‘Arbus kept
dipping into her subjective well, the hole in the ground where secrets lived,
then transposing what she saw there into images’ (p. 205). In Holy Motors, this subjective well takes
the literal form of a descent into an underground sewer. And it is in this
place that Merde, as the subject of the Arbus-style image, becomes an artist,
an image-maker in his own right.
Once
Merde has removed the beautiful Kay from her elevated, statuesque position and
taken her down into the depths of his underground sewer, he begins to dethrone
her. First he removes her material possessions, her bag and its contents,
smokes her cigarettes, eats her money and even her hair. He then undresses and
redresses her in a burka shaped from her gold silk dress, not only concealing
her beauty, but also remaking her as an Islamic woman – i.e., someone with very
different beliefs, religion and iconographic lineage to those we encountered in
the cemetery above.
It
is also here that Merde stages his own mise
en abyme, his tableau vivant that
suggestively recalls the surreal and romantic photographs of Joel Peter Witkin
and E.J. Bellocq, while echoing the look and feel of history paintings with
their chiaroscuro lighting illuminating figures in a dark, green-gold alcove.
Merde’s tableau vivant is also a
deconstruction of classic Pietàs of the Virgin Mary and the dying Jesus. He is
naked with an erect penis, showered with stolen rose petals from the cemetery
above, and lying across the lap of Kay remade as an Islamic woman.
In
this sequence, there is a topographical shift from the above-ground cemetery
fashion shoot to the lower depths of a green-shaded enclave. But Carax is also
tracing an eclectic history of the image, from contemporary digital
photography, through analogue image-making, to an extended history of painting
and the traditions of the tableau vivant.
As we observe the various stagings and remakings of figures, settings,
compositions and iconography, Carax is also asking us to look closely and
question what is at the very heart of an image.
|
Anna
Dzenis
|
The Time is Out of Joint!
Towards
the end of Holy Motors, Monsieur
Oscar meets fellow role player Eva Grace/Jean (Kylie Minogue) at the derelict
La Samaritaine department store in Paris. Eva moves into a chanson performance
of ‘Who Were We?’ à la Scott Walker. Prefigured by Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out
of My Head’ in an earlier party scene, Eva’s hymn to lost time – and Minogue’s much
anticipated appearance – could function as an embodiment of the various
episodes that precede it. However, Eva’s performance only further inculcates
the film’s nostalgia for a cinema pure and true, of the past and the future.
As
the scene draws to a close, Jean climbs upon a ledge on the roof of the store,
facing the camera as her lover scrambles up the building’s staircase to meet
her. As Oscar departs the building, he passes Eva and her lover suicided on the
beginnings of the Pont Neuf, as he moves on to his next role.
|
Deane Williams
|
She Was an Angel I Needed
Holy Motors is rife with dream logic. In its
opening sequence, a pajama-clad Carax plants himself in his own film, entering
it through a wall papered over with imagery of a forest, and happens upon a
cinema full of inanimate people, dead or asleep. The episodic structure is also
palpably dreamlike, in its transmission of Lavant through eleven adjacent
characters whose connections are not internal (organically serial) but external
– linked portmanteau-style by indomitable themes. For me, however – importantly,
an Australian – the most dream-like event in this grand assemblage is the
eruption of Kylie Minogue in a late sequence, where she appears as Monsieur
Oscar’s lost lover. Eruption is the wrong word, in the sense that Minogue’s
appearance was much touted before the film’s release, so hardly a surprise. It
worked instead like a foretold scene of extreme violence: an event that shot my
viewing through with anticipation, as I waited (with some impatience) to see if
each episode would contain it. When it did appear it ruptured the film for me, in the way an overly familiar and
ordinary figure or situation in a dream can. In a very exact manner, it
mirrored the shock I felt when – in turn – Marcus Graham and Melissa George
appeared in David Lynch’s exotic Mulholland
Dr. (2001).
In this case, however, I was shocked by the meekness of
Minogue in Carax’s exuberant work. It is tempting to read this as a ‘bad’
performance – with all the discursive power that this term implies. With her
thin, hesitant French – overly plagued by her Australian accent – her
understated makeup and gentle, diluted singing, she renders the sequence an
oddly subdued moment. Like everything else in Holy Motors, Minogue’s appearance is crammed with intertexts – the
Jean Seberg hair, the noir-ish trenchcoat – but these effects are sidelined by
the atmospheric shift that she triggers. Carax’s previous films have all been
built around an outlaw romance or infatuation that structures the characters
and their experience of the world. In his latest work, the relationship is
(explicitly) confined to one episode, and feels drained of intensity –
Minogue’s character is the polar opposite of the towering, strident embodiment
of Beauty presented by Eva Mendes in an earlier, astonishing sequence. As the
only tangible aspect of Oscar’s backstory that is seen, Minogue forms a site of
halted stillness within the movement and chaos: in a direct and mysterious
challenge to the popular claim that this film makes all other cinema today feel
very ‘buttoned down’, she is overly – and literally – ‘buttoned up’.
|
Claire Perkins
|
Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel
Love)
When
Raymond Bellour recently described (in ‘The Cinema Spectator: A Special
Memory’) the ‘subtle commotions, suspensions, interruptions, associations,
recalls and returns’ that demand the spectator’s attention, he could be
speaking about Holy Motors. I am
transfixed by it, captured and consumed by its movements and rhythms, the
connections and dislocations between each sequence, the sudden startling
eruptions and erections, rememberings, drifts and displacements. Its circuits
extend and transform through the film and beyond it, through cinema and the
rhythm of emotion. For all its reflection on the ‘death of cinema’ in the
digital age, Holy Motors is a
celebration of cinema, of life and love – and their joyous, painful,
all-consuming and inescapable coming together.
Cinema
erupts from the limousine as Lavant as Monsieur Oscar leaps out to kill The
Banker, played by Lavant in a reprise of the character from the beginning. It
traces a circuit in the repeated images from Étienne-Jules Marey’s
motion studies. The image and its malleability is in-your-face in the sequences
of high-intensity colouring and treatment that expel and (paradoxically)
underscore the intimacy of the image in the rest of the work (shot digitally by
Caroline Champetier and Yves Cape). Through fluidity of form, the cinema is in
the moment, on the screen and everywhere. It is here and now and it reaches
out. When Mendes is snatched from the podium by Merde, she transforms from the
unattainable figure of Beauty that is Kay M – via Fay Wray, with Christine
Gordon in I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
– and into the static, marble form of Michelangelo’s Pietà. More than
remembering, this sequence is a provocation. It is a question about beauty,
sexuality and the body evacuated of desire by desire. It is a question that
extends through forms, answered in the eye of the beholder.
In
a bounteous inversion, it is in the interval – that classic moment of
interruption – that Carax most obviously shows what film can do: demanding
attention and participation, insisting we become and are part of the momentum.
Just as the band of players are drawn toward and follow the accordion-playing
Lavant/Pied Piper, their numbers growing into an exuberant mass, I feel with
and through the movements and rhythms of Holy
Motors. Here, music is truly the ‘tonal analogue of emotive life’ (Susanne
Langer, Feeling and Form). And it is
this sense of musicality throughout
that is breathtaking about Holy Motors.
Tracing the forms of emotion, it is the intensity and pitch of love in all its
glorious, drawn out and devastating dynamics. The acrobatics of the stop-motion
sequence are the adrenalin, flush, lightness and fevered pulse of new love and
lust. The poignant intimacy, loneliness and disappointment of love is there in
the tight framing of the father and daughter set into the secondary frame of
the car. The in-between and nowhere that is adolescence emerges in the
increasing tension of this framing, constraining the awkward gestures of Angèle
(Jeanne Disson) as she bites into the éclair, her mouth smeared with its
stickiness. Minogue’s stifled facial and bodily gestures, as she moves through
the equally wrecked expanse of Samaritaine, effect the hollow absence of loss.
And it is succinctly summed up in words by Lavant as the dying old man: ‘Life
is better … for in life there is love. Death is good, but there’s no love’.
Holy Motors feels like gift, a
gift of and to cinema. It is a gift of love and life through ‘the beauty of the
act’. In death there is no love and no
cinema. Life is definitely better.
|
Julie
Banks
|
A Prayer for Daughters
Womankind – the everlasting irony in the life of
the community. (Hegel)
If Holy Motors is a science fiction poem
for the cinema that tries to reveal falsity through death, the daughters
compose the alien bodies that haunt its counterfeited future and undo its
nihilism. First, there is the scene in the car with the daughter Angèle, who tears the screen in two with her striking resemblance to Lavant.
Until corrected, I was convinced that she was Lavant’s real daughter. Nonetheless,
the power of this scene ripples throughout the film. Even if it is later
reflected, however absurdly, in the image of Mr Oscar with a family of chimps,
its doubled irony – much as it works in the first four films of the great
classic Planet of the Apes series
(1968-72) – reveals how the cinema can, in the figurative sense,
concretely anchor itself.
Things are there, but only cinema
can see them for what they are. In other words, it measures itself to their
unstable, disorderly, relative, and unintelligible nature. Real presence
requires shifting toward the figurative; the phenomenon – a face, a river,
a speed – must be recovered from the perspective of its strangeness. And this
strangeness does not refer to a mystery, to something dark and shameful [...] but to an essential alteration, to the
profoundly unidentifiable and impure dimension of things that cinema detects,
welcomes, and develops. Strangeness does not stem from an enigmatic lining of
the real but from an ‘excess of obvious facts’. (Nicole Brenez in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, p. 236)
Angèle is full of awkward grace, overshadowed by Lavant
who, in this scene, is condensed into a figure of patriarchal violence. He
avoids the rupture by blasting his car stereo either side of the phantasmatic
sequence in which she appears. Her immanence, constituted by the tears that
fall onto her lap, manifests an image of young girls that rarely comes to light
on the screen; the strangulated typography of the youthful girl almost always
blacks out the intimidating naivety of the faces. Their conversation is the
most bizarre in the film, but also the most moving. Her nonsensical
storytelling is full of gentle lies, ones we might expect from a child, which
are beaten into submission by Lavant. He tortures her and makes her admit to
the reality of her actions – right after shoving a cream cake in her mouth.
Yet, somewhere within this torture, love bursts out onto the screen: ‘I think the relationship between father and daughter is the most
beautiful possible relationship but also the closest to all the horror tales, I
mean the father can be a monster very easily’ (Carax).
Second, there is Kylie Minogue, popular culture’s
antipodal daughter. First, she played a mechanic, wedding Jason Donovan in Neighbours; then – in between coupling
with Nick Cave (in voice) and Michael Hutchence (in body) – produced sickly,
saturated music that disturbs bodies and minds. Now, she pretends that she can
speak French and wanders with glazed eyes through an abandoned department store.
She is tacky, absurd, celebrated for her excess – while still wholly within
mainstream culture. In Holy Motors, she
is condensed into a homage to Jean Seberg. But her lies are not a tragedy, even
though she becomes entangled with suicide; they are a celebration of the lunacy of the cinema as a medium that can transport
a creature such as Minogue – who found fame as a singer performing at a Fitzroy
Lions Football Club charity concert – into a reflection of avant-garde French culture.
‘Kylie is purity itself’ (Carax).
Third is the chauffeur – Édith Scob of Les yeux sans
visage – who ferries Lavant around in a limousine from scene to scene. Just as Angèle manages to reduce her father to nothingness (even if she herself does
not know it), Scob – daughter of the cinema – paradoxically
brings him back into his originary force. The
horror of a face and body cut up and transported from one mutilated scene to
the next is not a continuous revelation but, rather, a point of fixity. Characters
may keep dying in Holy Motors, but
the daughters keep their father in check.
|
Lauren Bliss
|
Who We Were When We Were
Clearly, we are many. And
there comes the day – more than once – when we ask ourselves who the hell we
are … or were, if our biological end is near. In a naïve, last-minute effort to
bring some order to the question of one’s own existence – or simply from the
desire to play one last game – and assuming the impossibility of victory, you
end up half-way or lost, having to accept your own confusion and hence the
irremediable disorder of all things. Or the disorder, and hence the confusion.
But, despite it all, we keep playing.
At the very beginning of Holy Motors, I thought I was watching a
reversal of the start of Fellini’s 8½ (1963); I was inside something of that sort, some other consciousness in full,
retrospective flight. But I wasn’t just identifying with this clone caught in a
subjective traffic jam; I also recalled a mixture of Zelig (1983), a few Bergmans, and Les yeux sans visage. But nothing indicates that it wasn’t all a
dream. Or just a mistake.
So, an overload of multiple
identities begins to take shape, on the screen and in the stalls: this man,
Oscar/Lavant, is a veteran actor (as much in the film as in real life), for some
virtually a family member, whose job is to don a costume maybe eleven times (or
more) a day. And in each of these roles, he leaves behind a piece of his own
life – as well as, in the most demanding instance, his entire reserve of
energy. He almost always goes right to the edge of an abyss, but can save
himself because he is a great actor, and because he has a magnificent chauffeur
(Scob, another screen veteran), a rigid schedule, and an enviable wardrobe of
clothes and accessories in the back of the limousine. The ‘wings’ of the stage
are located inside the car, and from there they can emerge into anywhere in the
world: the door opens, like a backdrop rising. At times, exhausted, the actor
longs for the death of all his roles. For Death itself.
There is also a woman who
was never meant to be (Kylie); the return of a previous character who embodies
the cry of ‘merde!’; and an erection that falls asleep. But, in reality, none
of this ever existed; likewise, we can categorise as lies the deceitful
daughter, the politician’s murder, the beggar, the prehistoric green man, the
Motion Capture, and that simulated-run on a gym treadmill (what could Muybridge
have done with that?) – during which Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’ might have played. And
all the phony tears – especially the tears. But we keep buying tickets,
requesting critics’ accreditations, looking out for download windows, and
hitting ‘play’. We exit the cinema inside the cinema, then we go to the cinema
outside that cinema – and then, stripped naked like a newborn babe, we decide
to return to the limousine.
And suddenly, yes, after so
long sleeping behind us, he finally wakes up: the consumptive, pajama-wearing
Mr Carax himself, caught between four walls, and willing to break through one
of them. Free of his bedroom-tomb, Carax confronts us with ourselves: one
audience views another. Perhaps only at this moment is the image disturbing; or
perhaps it is the only image that has ever existed, containing all the others.
Spectators before spectators, receiving the ultimate visitation, taking the
final bullet with our name on it. Once upon a time, that was sad Alex and his
‘bad blood’. And now, so many years on, this crazy director returns, almost
from the dead, to invoke, through cinema, his own resurrection: representing a
final, vehement performance, reappropriating, once again, that body named Denis
Lavant, invading it for the fifth time – a multiple invasion with multiple
masks and multiple locations, far deeper than ever before.
For the first time in
Carax’s cinema, Lavant is named not Alex but Oscar (the director’s birth name
is Alexandre Oscar Dupont), and the director who already mixed up the letters
of his old name now renews himself with a second name, and this old anatomical
extension of the ‘new wave’, this old ghost, intermittent enfant terrible, again twisting and cross-dressing in order to
celebrate, open-mouthed, a brave, resounding, ironic laugh which gathers all
the lived stories, and the stories that could not be lived, the stories that
were told, and those that remain to be told; and an autonomy proud of its
hubris and of its very own, immense actor – both of them willing to die with
each new lie. When backlit, a limousine may seem like a hearse. And vice versa.
|
Covadonga G. Lahera
|
(translated from the
Spanish by Adrian Martin. |
The Individual of the Spectacle
But to
whom is the spectacle played by Mr Oscar – in his nine, ten or eleven
successive roles – destined? To the spectators of Holy Motors who we are, certainly; to those who double us in the
theatre Carax slips into at the very beginning of the film, probably; to the
filmmaker who imagined and directed them, naturally.
The
closure of the film on itself – its serial performances could nourish the
machinery ad vitam aeternam without
any external witness needed – indicates, however, other recipients. We are
invited into a single day of Mr Oscar’s life, whose schedule has been (and will
be) very tight – this much we are told. Serving a ‘central command’ about whom
we will learn nothing, except that he needs to alert it in case of delay, Mr
Oscar keeps going through his metamorphosis, following a busy plan: he has appointments,
he works at appearing and performing, in a few minutes, what is expected of
him.
What is he
working at exactly, and what for? In turn, a banker, a Russian beggar, a Motion
Capture Operator Suit, an animalistic wastrel arisen from the sewer, a
widower-father of a young teenage girl, an accordionist, a murderer and his
victim, a dying old man, a humble family guy: Mr Oscar is the labourer of a
spectacle, erected as a system. Although the spectacle is dressed up in the
rags of cinematic or theatrical genres – documentary, erotic fantasy, monster
film, Asian-style gangster film, Chekhovian drama, where the underlying
phantasy could crack their seams – this spectacle is, above all, the spectacle
of our lives, the spectacle we have inherited, the one we reproduce eternally.
Mr Oscar’s performances maintain this spectacle-world; they keep it running,
but not so much for us, the spectators, as for those who take part in it. Mr
Oscar fits in like the missing piece within contexts that, without him, would
not reach their fulfillment, in scenes that his crucial intervention brings to
a lyrical or destructive paroxysm: that constitutes their price, and their
beauty.
The
rubbernecks gathered watching a fashion photo-shoot, jolted, frightened, hurt
by Mr Merde, are experiencing an electroshock; the photographer, and the model
he kidnaps, even more so. The teenager whom he, as a merciless father, leaves
alone – after telling her the sole punishment for her little lie will be to go
on living as herself – is doubtless shaken, scarred for life. The film’s loop
upon itself tightens in the sequence where Mr Oscar, as an old man, exhales his
last breath, awakened by a loving and tearful niece. Once death has come, after
a few seconds, he gently gets free of the young woman’s embrace, excusing
himself. Before hastening to his next appointment, he thanks her for the
intensity of the moment they have shared, telling her he hopes they will see
each other again, and asking for her name. Just like Mr Oscar she, too, is an
actress, a labourer of the spectacle. She, too, performed this scene. Although
it was only intended for them – unless
it was designed for the dog, their sole witness.
Between
each role, Mr Oscar dresses up, eats and rests in a big white limousine, his
backstage – driven by a beautiful, aged lady who is discreetly but entirely
devoted to him, his assistant and guide. We might believe that we find here the
rare interludes when Mr Oscar is himself – until the Samaritaine sequence comes
to disturb the system. Accidentally crossing the path of a woman he once loved
with all his soul – now made-up like him, ready to go on with her next role
like him – Mr Oscar follows her, longing to catch up, in their twenty minute
break, with the twenty years that have separated them. The scene, with its
love-and-death song echoing in a derelict Samaritaine, is more heartbreaking
than the musicals it replays, here bared and condensed in a unique, sublime
salute. We had left the spectacle-world, and yet it is back, more moving than
it ever was. As Mr Oscar passes, screaming, the corpse of his beloved – crashed
to earth for the part she came to play, a flight attendant who commits suicide
out of love, throwing herself off the Samaritaine roof (her ‘last flight’, since this film is full
of such black, withering humor) – we definitely lose the lines that have
distinguished on- and off-stage.
Exhausted,
devastated, Mr Oscar transforms, one last time, for his final role of the day.
The song by Gérard Manset, ‘Revivre’, accompanying this ultimate performance,
offers itself as a parable of the entire film: living again, beginning again,
is to perform again. Mr Oscar gathers his wavering strength to embody a humble
family man coming back home at night – in fact, to join a female monkey and her
children. Ultimately, the spectacle was intended only for himself. A spectacle
that alienates him, but is alone able to transfigure his world, to give it a
few instants of insane intensity, a few sparkles of furious beauty. A spectacle
where performing and coming (alive) are the very same thing.
|
Judith Revault d’Allonnes
|
(translated from the French
by the author and Adrian Martin)
|
Part One of Hail Holy Motors can be read here. |
from Issue 3: Masks |
© Individual contributors September–December 2012; © LOLA for the translations and the complete assemblage December 2012. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |