[music]
Now, if I were to tell you to pause this video,
stop whatever you're doing, and immediately watch Leos Carax's 2012 film Holy Motors,
what would be your course of action?
Would you stop watching?
Would you immediately open another tab and search for Holy Motors on a streaming site,
rent it for cheap, find a torrent,
get it on DVD if you're patient and... old?
Or would you look it up before watching it?
Do a quick search for a trailer for the film or a plot synopsis
or reviews of it that didn't start with someone telling you to stop watching the video that you were watching—
okay, good job Kyle, this is great internet content.
But still, I want you to think about how you watch most movies.
Because I wish I could replicate for you, the viewer, how I first saw Holy Motors.
I was lucky enough to catch it in a theater,
knowing next to nothing about the film other than the hype surrounding it.
And I saw, in that theater, the opening shot.
And I glanced around the theater, seeing this strange reflection on the screen, and I was hooked.
I didn't get a grasp on what was going on until about ten minutes in.
If you've seen the film in its entirety, and you should,
I wouldn't blame you if you never understood what was going on.
It's designed that way.
The movie keeps you on your toes, never gives you a real footing.
It's spontaneous and disorienting from the first shot to the last,
breaking the rules of reality, of logic,
even its own internal logic, even the logic of dreams themselves.
Maybe you were confused
or maybe even raptured, like that photographer character.
"Beauty, beauty, beauty!"
"Weird, weird, so weird!"
It's like they know me.
But here's my mental process while watching it.
A man gets out of bed, opens a door with his middle finger,
he finds a theater full of the sleeping,
and out of the corner of your eye, a toddler walks down the aisle.
And then we cut to that aisle and that toddler is now a great lumbering dog?
Then cut to the man, who is looking at the dog or the baby or whatever, and then looks to the screen.
And then a girl looks out of a window.
A man walks out.
We find out his name is Monsieur Oscar.
He's clearly rich, well-fed, worried about security, likely a banker.
He says au revoir to his family and then in his limo he makes a call,
and then he prepares a wig.
Okay, now he's walking out onto the streets of Paris as a beggar?
Does the banker do this for fun?
For perspective? To know what it's like?
Is he a rich eccentric?
But his monologue implies that he's been there for decades, begging on the streets.
And now we're back in the limo, and
it clicked.
He's an actor.
He goes through the appointments of the day, to Paris and its suburbs, performing scenes.
The scenes themselves are varied but familiar.
We can imagine them existing in their own films.
A family drama, crime thriller, a sci-fi action flick, a perverse monster movie,
and after each of them we return to the limo, no matter what happened in the scene.
Oscar dies about three or four times, and usually by his own hand.
But still, he continues.
Once the shock and strangeness of each scene fades,
we fall back into a strange ritual:
shed one character, rest, become another.
An actor's life.
At first I wondered if this was some kind of performance art,
like he was continuing the tradition of Allan Kaprow's Happenings.
But even performance art obeys the laws of the natural world.
If you die, you die, and you can't be in two places at once.
Then I realized, of course.
It's not theater.
What Oscar's doing can't be theater.
It's film.
We are in the world of film.
I should have picked up on that from this cut,
from the sleepwalker to the girl in the window.
From his eyeline, we see her looking back at him through a window.
Clearly, she's on the screen, he's watching.
The movie is awash in cinephilic in-jokes.
He inserts clips of early motion photography, simple acts of movement,
the basic magic trick that all film is built on.
Oscar's driver, played by Édith Scob, exits the film wearing a blank mask,
referencing her own famous role in Eyes Without a Face.
And about halfway through the film Oscar is visited by a man, likely his boss.
The man is played by Michel Piccoli,
and Carax uses him in much the same way that Tarantino used John Travolta,
calling attention to his status as a screen icon.
Over his six decade career, Piccoli's worked with Resnais, Godard,
Varda, Buñuel, Hitchcock, and Carax himself,
in the 1986 film Mauvais Sang, Bad Blood,
where he co-starred with a young actor named Denis Lavant,
Oscar.
I should have clarified, most of the in-jokes are to Leos Carax's own career.
There's the Piccoli-Lavant connection, plus there's this character,
which Lavant and Carax created for a segment of the film Tokyo.
His name is Monsieur Merde and he's just adorable.
[screams]
And there's a third, missed connection.
Carax originally wanted to cast Juliette Binoche
in the role that would eventually go to Kylie Minogue.
It would have been a reference to their co-starring turns in Bad Blood and Lovers on a Bridge.
But Binoche dropped out and it was rewritten,
though you can still see the original intent of that casting.
It's a scene about reunited former lovers.
The actual act of filmmaking can be a very hermetic, lonely gig;
go to a location, do some nonsense there, leave.
And it's been that way since the silent era.
In fact, Holy Motors' best companion piece might be Man With a Movie Camera,
a lone artist going through a city, getting acts, capturing beauty.
But of course, there's a big difference between then and now.
I love this scene.
Lavant is doing motion capture.
He leaps, he fights.
Strange CGI magic, but stripped of actual CGI.
But it's still a perceptive statement about CGI.
Look at the final render of Smaug in The Hobbit.
"I hear your breath."
But compare that performance to watching Benedict Cumberbatch live on camera.
"I hear your breath."
"I feel your air."
It's riveting.
For Carax, the process of making GCI is more beautiful and more wondrous than the actual CGI product.
In fact, Carax seems frightened by digital filmmaking.
Oscar looks out of his limousine window
and the screen shows new ways of looking at the world;
thermal vision, night vision,
and finally a graveyard, rendered in a moshing, digital glitch.
But still, this film was shot on a RED EPIC, a high-end digital camera.
Carax hadn't made a feature film in a decade before he made Holy Motors.
Maybe for Carax, being out of the game so long, he finds it hard to keep up.
There's another deeply personal aspect of this film.
Four times Oscar plays the father of a daughter.
Let's rewind.
One daughter is played by Élise L'Homeau
and before that we meet a younger girl played by Jeanne Disson
and before that the first girl we meet is played by Nastya Golubeva Carax,
Carax's own child.
She's the girl on the screen,
and the man in the theater, looking at her, is Carax himself.
A man who we first meet waking up,
next to him, an empty bed.
Now fast forward to the very end, to the dedication.
The mother of Carax's child, who died aged 44 in 2011.
Yes, the movie is built on strangeness for strangeness' sake,
but it was born of a great tragedy.
Moreover, there's tragedy on an institutional scale.
When I first saw the film, I thought the audience was asleep,
but to other critics the audience was dead.
[singing]
Holy Motors is about the death of cinema itself.
[crash]
Now think again about how you might watch Holy Motors.
Find it streaming, download a torrent,
or maybe you were just looking for clips of Holy Motors on Youtube
and just happened to find this video talking about it.
But how likely are you to see this in a theater,
the way film has traditionally been seen?
Now imagine answering that question from the perspective of a filmmaker.
Think of how major studios have responded to the rise of the internet and digital streaming services.
In 2012, this was an industry in panic.
It isn't a new panic, of course.
Film faced its first existential crisis in the 1950s
when television became a media force
and again with the rise of home video in the 1980s.
But Holy Motors illustrates a uniquely 21st century anxiety—
the spread of non-narrative media.
We receive things in pieces.
The younger generation consumes in three-minute chunks
or six-second loops.
With the rise of YouTube, we've seen the illusion of intimacy,
the carefully constructed spontaneity and absurd humor built on a thousand in-jokes,
delivered in the free-wheeling rhythm of a podcast.
"Just like Bart!"
The images that might fill your head looking across the titles in your Netflix queue,
or your Tumblr feed or your Twitter feed.
This is the new form of cinema--
scattered, bizarre, decimated, incongruous,
holy.
Narrative film won't disappear, of course,
but even if Carax is fearful of the future of film, he makes a great case for the new order.
He built his tombstone for the old cinema in the style of the new cinema.
He flows episodically, embracing that spontaneity, that intimacy, that absurdity.
It's a film about filmmaking that looks backwards to illuminate what's going forward.
Because as novel as all these things may feel,
they've been part of the moving picture since the beginning.
And for all the demands of the craft, it's still worth it,
if even for one moment of pure, creative joy.
[music]