What drives you to stick with this job?
For the beauty of interpretation.
It is said that beauty exists only in the eyes of the viewer.
What if the audience doesn't watch it?
Leo Carax was born during the French New Wave. "Holy Cars" was released in 2012, and director Leo Carax was nominated for the Best Director Award at the 38th French Film Cesar Awards. At the beginning of the movie, the man walked towards the audience who were sleeping in the cinema. The director expressed his concerns about the film from the beginning: the decline of the film and the demise of the audience [1]. This is a real and clichéd topic. Through the perspective of an actor, Karax sets up film clips with different styles, representing different film types. Including human relations, eroticism (CG), fantasy, horror, love, cult, thriller, classical, singing and dancing, etc., it deeply explores the current internal and external contradictions of the film: the lack of creativity and the loss of the audience, and also uses the film to explore the modern The social division of labor (especially the film industry) destroys human nature. This article mainly tries to analyze the ideological core of the film from point to point through the interpretation of the film language through a fragment in the film.
At around 01:32:00 in the film, the male protagonist and old acquaintances bid farewell to the roof of an abandoned shopping mall. In ordinary shots, this scene is often used as a turning point in the development of the event, but in this film, since the previous article explained that the two people met for only half an hour, the scene is not long, but the setting is extremely clever. The play lasted for about two minutes. On the basis of not setting too many lines, it showed the true feelings of the two from reluctance to parting due to work reasons.
01:22:00 to do the foreshadowing. The location of the incident was explained by taking the camera upwards, paying attention to the flagpole marked by the red circle.
The two came to the roof. At this time, the two stood between the distant building (Notre Dame de Paris) and the flagpole. Although it was a distant view, the luminous building and the flagpole in the distance compressed the space where the two were located, highlighting the two closeness of human relationships.
At this time, the camera moves slowly to the lower right corner, and the space where the character is located is slowly compressed.
As the camera gradually approached, the woman first looked to her left, and then to her right, expecting the male protagonist to say something to her. There is no room for compression in the space between the two of them. At this time, the camera does not stop, but continues to move.
The camera continues to move. Finally, the man's body crossed the line on the left (the building in the distance), and at the same time, the woman turned back suddenly, and the two looked at each other. But the man suppressed his emotions, did not express what he wanted to express to the woman, and was ready to leave.
The camera continues to move. The man insisted on leaving, and the woman was reluctant to leave the man. The building in the distance moved behind the woman, and the man drew out. Next is a pair of reversible shots.
Man: Jane, there's something you don't know.
Woman: About you?
Man: About us.
(The woman turns around, looks to her left, glances at her watch, and looks to her right)
Man: Yes, time is against us (turns around), I'll go right away.
Woman: Okay, he'll be there soon.
Man: I better not meet him, yes (they look at each other).
So far, in two minutes, the director used the movement of the camera lens as the main narrative line, and the tight coordination between the camera lens language and the actors accurately expressed the feelings between the two. Later, when the man left the building, he saw the woman and another man commit suicide by jumping off the building. The man shouted and ran back to the car. At this moment, even he could not tell the truth from reality. In this scene, the struggle of the man as a special actor is vividly expressed. Facing the emotions expressed by the woman to him, his response seems immature and weak. In the end, he neither expresses his heart nor saves the woman he loves. . This is the director's thinking throughout the film: the result of social division of labor is to deepen the gap between people, all of which is absurd and uninteresting. The director expressed a point of view with simple and straightforward camera language. When we work, we can still show people with real faces, but we are often clumsy in expressing ourselves in the face of close relatives. The film ends with the cars worrying about their futures, adding a bit of joking to the film.
[1]. Liu Boxin. The Heterogeneous Author of "French New Cinema". 2020. Southwest University, MA thesis.
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