'Pour la beauté du geste’ / Leos Carax, Poet of the Cinema

At the Frieze blog, Tom von Logue Newth wrote, in 2012, about one of our favorite directors, and "real assumed" "poet of the cinema," Leos Carax.

There are not many poets left in the cinema. Perhaps the poet is always something of a throwback, a reminder of former glories. ‘Now I feel I make films for the dead and you show them to people who are alive’ says director Leos Carax, whose new film Holy Motors (2012) in part laments the passing of the mechanical age. It also evokes the Island of Cinema of which Carax speaks, a place where life is seen through the prism of cinema, but a prism that allows for all possible viewpoints, less to do with filmic reference and harking back, than to do with finding new ways to look at the world and the human condition.

That's not the only Carax piece at the ready for reprint. First, Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted his 1994 essay on Carax for Film Comment--is this a "problem about poetry." Ha: "The problem isn’t merely poetry as a general concept, but French poetry in particular." Plus:

At a panel discussion held at the New York Film Festival in 1966, Pier Paolo Pasolini, propounding his recently formulated concept of the cinema of poetry, noted, “For a literary critic, the distinction between the linguistics of prose and poetry are absolutely clear. Each one of us, just by opening a book without even reading it, understands immediately whether the book is poetry or prose.” At this point, Annette Michelson, who was sitting on the same panel, made a one-word comment: “Lautréamont” — because, as she noted later, “Lautréamont represents that point in poetry in the nineteenth century when the distinctions between poetry and prose begin to break down.”

[...]

In the world of the American mainstream, where Lautréamont has yet to become a viable concept, prose is still prose, hence marketable, and poetry is still poetry, hence esoteric. . . .

We might have also suggested the twentieth-century version, with "Leduc." Anyhow! Two days ago, Carax's first film, Boy Meets Girl--atypical for a first film, especially in terms of speed of its making--was put under Jeremy Polacek's pen at Hyperallergic.

Carax has made only four feature films in the interim, each one released in successively longer gaps: Mauvais Sang followed Boy Meets Girl two years later, after which came The Lovers on the Bridge in 1991, then Pola X eight years later, and finally Holy Motors, 13 years after that. The wide bellows of time between releases could be seen as a director slowing down, taking his time, becoming troubled — and many of the projects, especially Pola X, did face setbacks and some poor reviews. But inevitably Carax grew older, more mature, more assured, at the same time that he was becoming more inimitable, oddly brilliant, and ageless. Holy Motors is arguably his best work, and one of the best films of recent years, but it’s a movie only an older Carax could make. By comparison, Boy Meets Girl, which has just received a marvelous restoration, has never looked more youthful or beautifully desperate.

The film opens with a surreal, prophetic scene that glides from a child reciting a jaded, melancholy line about loneliness and life to a close-up of a hand toying with rosary-like beads to a woman calling from her car phone to announce that she’s done with her boyfriend. In this permanently nighttime Parisian setting, Carax’s frequent collaborator and longtime alter ego, Denis Lavant, plays Alex, an aspiring filmmaker, petty thief, and, allegedly, soon-to-be solider. Wandering the streets, Alex grieves and rages over a breakup, in the darkness and solitude passing by a constellation of celestial-seeming stars like himself: the smeary reflection of lights on the Seine, the blinking lights within a pinball machine, the dabbled black-and-white pattern of a kitchen wall.

If you're in New York, you are fortunate to have the aforementioned restoration showing at Film Forum, accompanying a new documentary on the director from Tessa Louise-Salomé (opens on Friday 8/15). “'Is Leos Carax your real name or an assumed one?' 'It’s a real assumed name.' 'What’s your opinion of Carax?' 'I wish him courage…' – Godard.