Movement of World in "Mauvais Sang" and "Holy Motors"
Video + Text
“The dream-image is subject to the condition of attributing the dream to a dreamer, and the awareness of the dream (the real) to the viewer.
The optical and sound image is quite cut off from its motor extension, but it no longer compensates for this loss by entering into relation with explicit recollection-images or dream-images. If we likewise attempt to define this state of implied dream, we would say that the optical and sound image extends into movement of world…a movement of world which supplements the faltering movement of the character.
There takes place a kind of worldizing…a depersonalizing, a pronominalizing of the lost or blocked movement. The road is not slippery without sliding on itself…the world sets about running away for him and takes him with it, as if on a conveyor belt. Characters do not move, but, as in an animated film, the camera causes the movement of the path on which they change places, ‘motionless at a great pace’. The world takes responsibility for the movement that the subject can no longer or cannot make. This is a virtual movement, but it becomes actual at the price of an expansion of the totality of space and of a stretching of time.”
– Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985)
In Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012), the protagonist, Oscar (Denis Lavant), is a mysterious man who slips in out of various personas, seemingly performing for some invisible audience. In one of his assignments early on in the film, he performs as a motion capture artist. What ensues is something of a sequel to one of Carax’s most romantic and memorable scenes: that of Lavant (“Alex”) running down an endless street to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” in Mauvais sang (1986). In Holy Motors, he is asked to board and run on a treadmill. Carax frames him from the side in front of a green-screen displaying various colorful graphics (reds, whites, and blacks transiently emerge as if from the palette of the 1986 film). This time, however, the whimsical cinematic spirit of the earlier tracking shot is replaced with a slow push-in, conveying the illusion of tracking from the scrolling phantasmagoria in the background. Now the ground moves for Lavant (Alex? Oscar?) and instead of him spontaneously erupting into an ecstatic expression of his love (and Carax’s love for cinema), he is being coldly commanded by a disembodied voice to perform until he can eventually stand (it) no longer.
In Mauvais sang, love opens a doorway to a world of waking dream-images. Alex moves forward, commanding the camera to follow him. It is as if he invents the steps in front of him. In Holy Motors, dream-images have become so ambiguously inversed with the real, agency is undermined, every step is programmed, and movement is beyond and not even for the self. The spectator is likewise suspended in a space where distinguishing between real and imaginary is futile. The perpetual flux between the virtual and the actual has subordinated the latter to the former (it is with this that Carax grapples and attempts to resist throughout Holy Motors). The lines between the diegetic and extradiegetic; the textual and extratextual are rendered inscrutable, indiscernible.
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