There is content all around us. Look around you and you are bound to find the inspiration for endless pieces of content.
A woman pushes a stroller around a cul-de-sac. Content.
A dusty guitar leans against a teenager’s bedpost. Content.
Or, as Netflix’s Bojack Horseman hilariously pointed out in its final season, even a birthday greeting card could be a source of content (nevermind the strange dynamic of one of the streaming giant’s biggest hits so brazenly biting the hand that feeds.)
There is content all around us. But is there cinema?
This is the question Martin Scorsese recently posed in a piece for Harper’s Magazine entitled “Il Maestro.” Scorsese intended the essay as a tribute to legendary filmmaker Federico Fellini, but it ultimately gained significant traction due to the director’s comments on so-called “content” in the age of streaming.
In “Il Maestro,” Scorsese laments the proliferation of content across streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. He explains how these streaming services establish a false sense of democratization, ultimately allowing complex algorithms to determine that which is worthy of audience consumption. In the era of content, a film or television show is measured not by its contribution to the age-old question of “what is cinema?” but by its ability to generate clicks. Today, there is more value in Zendaya removing fake eyelashes in Malcolm & Marie than there is in Scorsese’s own Netflix contribution The Irishman, which dared to reckon with the auteur’s past as a purveyor of cinematic bloodshed.
Of course, some have been quick to label Scorsese a hypocrite. After all, he and Netflix have had a fruitful partnership. In addition to The Irishman, Scorsese has directed a Bob Dylan documentary Rolling Thunder Revue, as well as a docu-series about Fran Leibowitz entitled Pretend It’s a City for the streaming service. While Scorsese is well within his rights to simultaneously critique and cooperate with the evolving media landscape, his comments do bring to mind an altogether different yet particularly crucial film, one that, just as the age of streaming took hold, still dared to ask “what is cinema?”
Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) is a difficult film to describe. Ostensibly, it follows a day in the life of Oscar (Denis Lavant), a man whose job requires him to fulfill various “appointments.” These appointments can consist of anything and everything, and often require Oscar to inhabit another character of some kind. Holy Motors is essentially an entire streaming service’s catalog packed into an hour and fifty-six minutes. It is a musical, a family drama, a thriller, a surreal Lynchian nightmare, and even, briefly, animated!
Holy Motors neither resists nor rejects interpretation. In fact, its perversely provocative plot invites several. The film’s outlook on contemporary cinema emerges as its most immediate concern. After all, the film opens with an unnamed man (played by Carax himself) wandering through a movie theater inexplicably attached to his own apartment. This early segment remains entirely separate from Oscar’s day of work, but it quickly establishes Holy Motors as an inquiry into the status of cinema.
Carax codifies Holy Motors as an adventure in absurdism, allowing actor (or is it shapeshifter?) Denis Lavant to masquerade as everything from an old woman beggar to a grotesquely ravenous leprechaun. In this way, the director permits a purely superficial reading of the film, one in which Lavant’s fiery performance(s) is enjoyed as ridiculous shlock, but not necessarily as an enterprise in cinematic trial and error.
Either approach to the film is appropriate, but it is significant that Carax offers both. He is far from the only working director to blend various genres and techniques in order to interrogate cinema’s potential; Gaspar Noé and Michael Haneke have been doing it for years (maybe it’s a French thing?) but Holy Motors offers a surprising degree of accessibility. Sure, some viewers will be taken aback by the film’s sudden intermission, which doesn’t even arrive halfway through the film, or the even more sudden appearance of a chimpanzee family, but Carax does not set out to alienate his viewers. Whereas films like Climax (2018) or Funny Games (1997) are transgressive so as to affront their audience, Holy Motors maintains a gentle edge. If anything, it’s actually a rather funny film; one of Oscar’s many characters is named Monsieur Merde, and the accordion-heavy intermission doubles down on the French expletive. Carax is not chastising us for our participation in a contemporary media landscape that prioritizes short-term gratification or means-tested formulas. He is simply asking us to laugh, maybe even mourn, alongside him.
But what are we mourning exactly? In its own twisted way, Holy Motors makes its sorrows rather evident. For example, Oscar expresses his longing for a bygone era, one when cameras were bigger, clunkier, heavier. Back then, cinema had no choice but to be about cinema. Every film could see itself being made. Now, Oscar laments, cameras are smaller, to the extent that they are nearly invisible. Oscar’s frustration is similar to Scorsese’s in that he recognizes a false sense of democratization emerging from cinema’s recent developments. Cameras are getting smaller, so anything from a Marvel movie to a TikTok can be a “film.” Of course, there’s something empowering about this new trend. The barrier to entry is lower… yada, yada, yada. But the lingering concern is how corporate powers like Netflix and Amazon have co-opted the playing field and ultimately diminished the breadth of what is possible in film.
Gatekeepers are nothing new in cinema. They will always be around in some capacity. Carax had to deal with a few limitations of his own in making Holy Motors. Most notably, Carax wanted to shoot Holy Motors on film but ultimately conceded to investors’ insistence that he use digital photography. Obviously, the film would have benefitted from Carax’s initial vision, relying upon the same clunky cameras Oscar (and by extension, Carax) worries will go obsolete. Even Carax himself operates as a sort of gatekeeper in Holy Motors. Late in the film, Oscar encounters a woman — Élise — with the very same occupation. Élise simultaneously exists within and outside of Oscar’s seventh appointment, as does Eva, another character whom Oscar encounters during his eighth appointment. As Oscar encounters these women who share his very same mysterious profession, the walls dividing Oscar’s appointments begin to crumble. In such a strange film, this appointment-based structure remains one of its few guiding principles. And yet, even Oscar cannot help but desire a world beyond his own structured cinematic experience. Perhaps even Carax himself is frustrated by his own limitations or those imposed by cinema at large.
In one of the film’s most poignant and existential moments, Oscar’s boss comments on the notion of beauty being in the eye of the beholder. “And if there’s no more beholder?” Oscar asks in return. Oscar shares in Scorsese’s fear that film has been siloed from other parts of culture, from other parts of itself, and is being rendered obsolete as a result. Carax, just as he did previously with his debut Boy Meets Girls (1984) and the acclaimed Lovers On A Bridge (1991), is contributing to a broader conversation surrounding cinema and its own contribution to this thing we call a society. Carax was inspired to make Holy Motors after inspecting a limousine, observing its strange combination of privacy and flashiness. They simultaneously draw attention to themselves, whilst shutting out the external world. The same could be said of Holy Motors, which captivates with its talking cars and Lavant’s elaborate transformations but remains only somewhat penetrable. Carax concluded that limousines may soon be obsolete, that they are a relic of a not-so-digitalized age. The director may even have similar concerns regarding the trajectory of his own career. His next project marks his English-language debut, a musical entitled Annette starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. Annette will be distributed in the U.S. by Amazon Studios, but still has no clear release date. Is there still a place for a director like Carax? Does his seeming shift towards the Hollywood studio system suggest his own inability to break free of corporate entrapment? There is little reason to doubt Carax’s talent or imagination, but nearly a decade has passed since Holy Motors first bewildered audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. Has he rendered himself a limousine? Are Carax and his idiosyncratic style soon to be obsolete as well? The fear, of course, is that cinema at large will suffer the same fate.
Indeed, cinema, like any art form, is bound to evolve through time. But are the medium’s recent developments indicative of evolution or devolution? Great films continue to be made, but the parameters surrounding the creation of those films have become increasingly suffocating. In order for a contemporary film to be canonized or recognized in any meaningful way, it must ultimately reinforce the status quo. The onslaught of films arriving this year on Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ needn’t innovate or challenge dominant ideologies. Rather, they must offer individual frames or one-liners that can live on in digital perpetuity. Even worse, these streaming services often appeal to our desire for something progressive or transformative, only to support economic and political systems that have grown exponentially obsolete. Corporate powers have their own existential fears — not unlike Carax’s — regarding their own encroaching obsolescence. And so they have repurposed societal resistance as their own agent of self-maintenance. Whereas Carax manifested his concerns via a piece of art bursting at the seams with new ideas of what is possible for an art form he loves, the world’s largest streaming services have greenlit art of their own in an attempt to shrink the same window that made Holy Motors possible. Recent films like Netflix’s I Care A Lot speak the language of feminism and anti-capitalism but ultimately reinforce corporate hegemony. Disney, of course, has also been doing this for years across several different properties, poking fun at consumer culture and the like, while fortifying its very foundation. As distribution channels shift increasingly online, cinema will be increasingly discouraged from offending, provoking, confronting, or challenging.
If these takes sound like those of a 78-year-old New Yorker, that’s because they are. I share in Scorsese’s anxiety at the age of 23 because we should all be very concerned when the rules of art are regulated by a consolidated group of the rich and powerful. In fact, we should probably be concerned when art is governed by rules at all! Holy Motors breaks those rules and operates as a broader rejection of their very existence. Carax creates a smorgasbord of cinematic offerings, from musical to thriller to comedy to family drama. If future filmmakers want to contribute to that age-old question “what is cinema?” (and maybe even topple the industry’s corporate hierarchy while they’re at it), then perhaps they can pull an idea or two from Holy Motors’ mishmashed menu of movie magic.
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