Carax in the 21st Century

     Leos Carax began his career with the lustrous 35mm cinematography of Jean-Yves Escoffier (Boy Meets Girl, 1984; Bad Blood, 1986; and The Lovers on the Bridge, 1991). His 21st century work has, however, all been shot by Caroline Champetier. The move towards small, highly mobile cameras was surely motivated partially by budgetary exigency, but it has opened up new creative possibilities and has accompanied a more explicitly Baudelairean turn in his filmmaking. As in Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil (1857) [i], desecration and sanctification meet in both subterranean and elevated environments that are ironically connected to everyday life and a Dantean sense of structure.
     This is epitomized in Annette (2021) by the shift from the unabashed duet "We Love Each Other So Much" (first clip below) through the abstract depictions of operatic violence (second clip below) to the final public disclosures of murder (third clip below).
     Carax and Champetier make these transitions clear by repeating camera movements, color combinations, and viewing positions. The digital tendency towards flatness and garish color is here turned into a new form of paradoxical order. Hence, in the first clip below, the dominant video colors of blue, red, and green are used, along with matching gestures and movements, to unite the central characters together. These colors are separated into different areas of space in the final extract with Baby Annette below. Similarly, the introductory camera movement and music above is echoed in the movement around the piano below. These forms of movement are reworked in the stagecraft of the final extract. 
     The very high light sensitivity of digital cameras has also made it possible to shoot in extremely low-light conditions and to create images that straddle new thresholds of exposure and visibility. The most striking manifestation of this is in the musical movement through Église Saint-Sulpice in Holy Motors (2012, bottom). One of the defining sequences of Champetier's career, it is both naturalistic and abstract, combining movements of camera and actors in an iconic physical space with an imaginative force that is irreducibly cinematic.