Hainge, Greg

University of Queensland eSpace

  
International Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 9 No. 41, July 2005
 
 
 
 
  
Greg Hainge
 
Carax and the Ambiguities -- A Book That Needs To Fail, Perhaps:
On Daly and Dowd's _Leos Carax_
 
 
Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd
_Leos Carax_
Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003
ISBN 0-7190-6315-9
188 pp.
 
Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd's _Leos Carax_ is published in Manchester
University Press's French Film Directors series, a series which has in the
past dedicated volumes to filmmakers such as Beineix, Besson, Blier,
Chabrol, Renoir, and Truffaut. Whilst it cannot be doubted that Carax
deserves attention as one of France's most idiosyncratic directors who
has consistently produced films that reveal a very personal vision
influenced by equally personal viewing and reading tastes, one has to
wonder if the four feature-length films that constitute Carax's main body
of work to date provide enough substance for a book-length study of this
kind. In reading this volume, one is tempted to think that perhaps they
do not, for, especially in the first chapter dealing with _Boy Meets Girl_
(1984), _Mauvais Sang_ (1986), and Carax's *nouvelle vague*
inheritance, we find many long historical and theoretical digressions that
most often remain somewhat disembodied from the supposed main
focus of the book -- such passages appearing, then, to act as filler which
bulks out the somewhat meagre primary matter.
 
In one such passage, for instance, we encounter an in-depth discussion
of the four fundamental principles of the Baroque which enable us to
apprehend the possibility of a cinematic language that breaks with
 
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Renaissance forms (45-49). Many passages such as this (in spite of their
indebtedness to other thinkers -- the discussion of the Baroque, for
instance, being very reliant on the writings of Buci-Glucksmann) provide
very lucid and interesting syntheses of concepts not often associated
with analyses of cinema, and more often found in literary analysis.
Whilst such an approach is no doubt justified in any study of Carax
whose antecedents and influences are to be found in the literary realm
as often as in the world of cinema, what is missing in Daly and Dowd's
approach is a full articulation/application of the findings of these
secondary analyses to the actual body of work that they are purportedly
writing about. So, for instance, this long exergue on the Baroque
actually leads into a reflection on the way in which Beineix's _La Lune
dans le caniveau_ comes to exemplify the mannerist tendencies and
highly artificial modes that were seen to characterise the *cinema du
look* with which Carax's oeuvre is often associated.
 
This incessant straying away from the main focus of the book is
undoubtedly the result of one of the volume's main aims. For whilst the
authors state their primary intention as being to find a critical language
able to account for the challenges that Carax's films pose to narratival
and imagistic normativity in the cinema, to register the shocks that
these films produce in their attempts to think *otherwise* (17), the
authors are also at pains to situate Carax in a certain lineage so as to
register both his similarities to and differences from directors such as
Beineix, Denis, Garrel, Godard, Rivette, Ruiz, and Techine. Indeed, the
authors rightly assert that Carax is situated in the lineage of the
*nouvelle vague*, 'in that he reflects through a complex interplay of
homage and allusion his relationship with precursors and influences,
occasionally the better to free himself of the stranglehold these latter
can effect upon the filmmaker' (22). It is somewhat ironic then that this
desire to reference so many other texts seems at times to exert on the
authors a stranglehold from which they have some trouble wresting
themselves. At times, for instance, we are privy to reasonably extended
discussions of the work of directors seemingly far removed from the
concerns of Carax, such as Lars von Trier. When this happens,
invariably, potentially interesting and contentious points are raised about
these other oeuvres -- such as the statement that von Trier's _Dancer in
the Dark_ 'required Bjork rather than a professional actor' because it is
'a reflection on 'affects' and forces, rather than affections and characters'
(21) -- but these points cannot be fully expanded upon since the
analysis, as it should, returns to its examination of Carax and his films.
In other passages, meanwhile, this desire to establish profound
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genealogical links between Carax and other directors leads to some very
problematic suggestions, none more so to my mind than the implication
that the character played by Denis Lavant in Claire Denis's _Beau
travail_ is one of the possible futures from the virtual present of the
character Lavant plays in Carax's _Les Amants du Pont Neuf_ (1991),
and this, seemingly, because both characters dance.
 
Much the same problem can be found in the book's discussion of the
literary intertexts of Carax, which, as indicated above, are numerous.
Thus, Artaud, Baudelaire, Beckett, Celine, Cocteau, Kafka, Kundera,
Melville, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Zola (amongst others) are
all cited as literary points of reference for Carax, authors with whose
work Carax's own shares certain affinities or else explicitly cites. The
problem with such an approach when dealing with a filmmaker such as
Carax is that this list could go on almost interminably: in other words, so
great are the potential intertexts that make up Carax's own work that
one will most probably always miss some, and the research methodology
used is therefore highly reliant on chance encounters, on a subjective
process of recognition that does not ultimately tell us very much about
Carax, especially since some of the main literary references he uses are
alluded to only briefly and superficially. For instance, the references to
and influence of Louis-Ferdinand Celine in all of Carax's films is far
greater than the authors here imply -- indeed the opening lines of _Boy
Meets Girl_ are a direct quotation from Celine's _Mort a credit_. One
might even be tempted to suggest that Carax has in a somewhat
perverse manner modelled his own career on Celine's, as he also (as
Daly and Dowd suggest of Carax) produced an aesthetic in which there is
a '*necessity of failure*' which, whilst appearing to stem from a
self-defeating talent, comes in fact from 'a performative defection from
selfhood' (173-4).
 
And so with the philosophical concepts used to aid in our understanding
of these films, for whilst the main philosophical filter through which the
analysis here passes is a decidedly Deleuzian one, concepts are also
borrowed from Bataille, Benjamin (Andrew and Walter), Blanchot, de
Certeau, Descartes, Derrida, Foucault, Heraclitus, Jameson, Kierkegaard,
Leibniz, Lucretius, Lyotard, Nietzsche, Serres, and Spinoza. With regards
to the Deleuzian philosophy on which the approach taken here is very
reliant, many interesting readings are proposed but, again, rarely
expanded into a full analysis of how the films or characters under
discussion actually come to articulate the philosophical concept being
used. So, for instance, the authors suggest that the character of Alex in
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_Mauvais Sang_ comes to embody 'a splitting of time in the subject . . .
at one and the same time the weight of the past and the giddy lightness
of the present' (69), but rather than explain this fully the authors tell us
merely that: 'In order to dramatise this split into I and ego Carax
employs every cinematic means at his disposal: *mise en abyme*,
mirroring, doubling and reflection' (69). Similarly, the suggestion that
Carax's use of speech in his first films obviates the need for voice-over
and becomes indicative of the emergence of larval subjects is fascinating
but merely a tease without further elaboration, as is their suggestion
that 'decisions as to angle, framing, lighting and *mise en scene* [in
_Pola X_] facilitate . . . the displacement of a psychoanalytic
interpretation', presenting instead 'bodies, communicating mutely and
intensely at the edge of bifurcating and dissolving identities' (156).
 
It becomes clear throughout this book that Carax's work is for the
authors a kind of constant invocation of philosophy, for different
characters or settings in the films provide them with apparent cinematic
equivalences of philosophical concepts found in various of Deleuze's
texts. Once more, however, this approach seems somewhat slapdash,
relying on chance recognition and coincidence rather than a systematic
exploration, the methodology employed thereby being akin to a game of
snap played by the authors with two decks of cards, a Deleuze deck and
a Carax deck. And yet, whilst it no doubt sounds like I can find nothing
of worth in this volume and no salvation for it on any level, I cannot
bring myself to reject it totally, for the simple reason that it does
manage to reproduce for the reader the shocks that the films hold for
the authors; or, to put this another way, the book makes me want to
visit the films again and, what is more, not just to watch them but to try
and follow through on some of the possibilities opened up by this book
and to think them differently. Given that the authors see Carax's films as
an attempt to think the world *otherwise*, there opens up the possibility
here, of course, that the book itself operates as a kind of *mise en
abyme*. Indeed, at the end of the chapter dealing with Carax's
adaptation of Melville's _Pierre or the Ambiguities_ (in French _Pierre ou
les ambiguites_, hence _Pola X_ (1999), the X signifying the fact that
the filmed version came from the tenth version of the screenplay to
issue from Carax's computer) it is suggested that here 'Literature . . .
becomes the difference of film; the figurative (image) propensities of the
latter interact with the discursive (linguistic) elements of the former,
while in this interaction is sustained and maintained the figural as
reservoir of that difference itself' (172). Could this not, in a sense, be
described as the process at work in this book, in which various discursive
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strategies, that are never sufficient in themselves, exert a differential
force upon the cinematic product by dint of their inability sufficiently to
account for the images whose forms they can ultimately only ever undo
and not explicate? If so then other intriguing possibilities can be
entertained. For instance, if, as the authors claim, Carax's attitude
towards appropriation is akin to that of the sampler, then could this not
also furnish us with an explanation for the vertiginous referential survey
that the authors create in their enumeration of cinematic and literary
intertexts? Could it in fact be that this methodology which I have
criticised is in actuality a means to explicate through emulation and
thereby to create a self-referential vortex that collapses in on itself and
necessarily fails as must Carax's aesthetic?
 
As much as I would like to believe that this is the case, this reading of
the text is, I fear, itself a fanciful *mise en abyme*, a reading of a
reading and one that does not really hold up to scrutiny. This is not to
say that there is nothing to praise here, however, quite the contrary.
Indeed this volume will be a valuable resource for anyone wishing to
examine Carax's films further, as it gives much useful background
information and references. More than this, as I have suggested, many
of the ideas presented here truly do open up new ways of seeing these
films. However, it is the very richness of possibilities of these films that
this book allows us to glimpse that is its own ultimate downfall, for whilst
much of the book seems like filler, as I began by suggesting, it actually
demonstrates to its own detriment that Carax's oeuvre, as minimal as it
may be, needs no filler, and can inspire and provoke a far greater need
for reflection than the entire body of work of other far more prolific
directors.
 
University of Adelaide, Australia
 
 
Copyright © Film-Philosophy 2005
 
 
Greg Hainge, 'Carax and the Ambiguities -- A Book That Needs To Fail,
Perhaps: On Daly and Dowd's _Leos Carax_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 9
no. 41, July 2005 <http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol9-2005
/n41hainge>.
 
 
 
 
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Carax and the ambiguities - a book that needs to fail, perhaps: on Daly and Dowd's Leos Carax

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Carax and the ambiguities - a book that needs to fail, perhaps: on Daly and Dowd's Leos Carax

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