After spending his early career transfiguring the aesthetics of early Jean-Luc Godard and other works from the French New Wave’s starting days for his own freewheeling bursts of style that would be dubbed cinéma du look in some circles, Leos Carax has finally turned to what came after. 42-minute featurette It’s Not Me isn’t the first film to take cues from the late-period essay films of Godard that mashed up countless audiovisual quotations of sources alongside the author’s own commentary to form a thesis, but as the title implies, Godard is not Carax, and this film is not quite a Histoire(s) du Cinema or a Goodbye to Language. It is merely Carax taking the baton from Godard, with the hopes of passing it on to someone else. The Godard title that comes closest to summarizing Carax’s approach is The Image Book, with Carax frequently leafing through his filmography and reconfiguring it in a new context. Late periods and self-plagiarism are a consistent preoccupation throughout, most hauntingly when we hear David Bowie’s Lazarus without the backing music.
The film is the result of an exhibit that never panned out at the Centre Pompidou, which asked Carax to come up with an answer to the question “where are you at, Leos Carax?” Carax evades the question by scrambling up old footage while claiming it’s him and his family, operating in the same spirit as how he chose the nom de plume “Leos Carax” by anagramming his birth name of Alex Oscar. Movies and their so-called “empathy machine” status seem to get taken apart throughout It’s Not Me. Carax veers from focusing on children (including his own daughter) and their attitudes toward stories of horror, to his noted commonalities with another short-statured Jewish filmmaker: Roman Polanski. The former group is usually lucky enough to hear about Hitler through stories and can direct their own dreams so that he’s less of a threat: Carax’s daughter talks about her father being chased by a shark. This isn’t always the case, and alongside snapshots of the poor, beleaguered children in films like Germany Year Zero, we have the case of Polanski himself, who Carax notes went from fleeing the Holocaust while his family was murdered and then losing his wife in the Manson murders to sodomizing an underage girl. These are all sides to the same human, and perhaps that’s why this movie also shows one of Carax’s most famous characters in conversation with the director before defecating in a park. We all produce shit in some form or another, but whether the highs of something like Nina Simone’s “Four Women” are enough to compensate for the slavery that inspired it is a question with only one real answer.
The Carax of It’s Not Me claims to have only performed one POV shot in his prior films, and also recounts a fable about a man who killed his wife to remove her one visual flaw in the form of her beauty mark. He also provides a demonstration of “24 frames per second” with a fresh apple — “une bonne pomme” — and how it seems to imprint itself upon the eye as individual frames. Carax’s work taking such explicit influence from Godard recalls the little-known experimental filmmaker Andrew Noren and his own Godard-influenced obsession with how films are light, shadow, and “retinal phantoms,” with both self-plagiarizing their old material in their digital periods and rendering it uncannily new. They also both featured black cats and reversed footage of dives into water, and both took heavy influence from Dziga Vertov’s classic Man With a Movie Camera. What it means for a director like Leos Carax to look at the world and capture it through cinema (possibly killing it as a result) is translated through both the famous Vertov shot of the camera-eye, followed by a selection of eyepatched directors like John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Raoul Walsh. Tracking shots used to have the weight of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise by virtue of featuring heavy film cameras; now they have the lightweight and disposable quality of a boy stalking a girl with a cell phone. The world no longer blinks and is going blind from too many images as a result, claims Carax — hence the recent barrage of fascist politicians who claim to see the problem. It’s a great provocation to leave us with, especially when accompanied by a sequence of Carax’s Pola X featuring its two stars who died young — Guillaume Depardieu as the Carax stand-in, and Carax’s former partner Yekaterina Golubeva. The fire they sit by blinks out and the shadows overtake them, but when the credits kick in, more is promised after the parade of sources is finished, and we get the marvelous in-joke of a scene featuring three Carax films in one. It’s not a Carax scene, and yet that’s the only thing it could be described as: old images and new ones at once.
DIRECTOR: Leos Carax; CAST: Leos Carax, Denis Lavant, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Loreta Juodkaite; DISTRIBUTOR: Sideshow/Janus Films; IN THEATERS: December 10; RUNTIME: 42 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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