Tales of Modern Love: Leos Carax, Rebirthing Cinema

Though the often-fraught and meticulous creative process of Leos Carax (1960–) has resulted in the production of only six features and a handful of shorts, the fabulist French writer-director’s imagination, sincerity and acknowledgement of the unknowable has remained consistent across his 45-year career.

Born Alex Christophe Dupont, Carax announced his unconventionality early in life by changing his name at the age of 13. Often non-verbal as a teenager, he became fascinated with silent film while attending the Cinémathèque française. After a handful of aborted projects and a brief stint with Cahiers du cinéma, he completed the dreamlike short Strangulation Blues (1980), and gained international attention with the equally nocturnal feature Boy Meets Girl (1984).

Categorised as part of the cinéma du look movement due to his work’s bold aesthetics, Carax diverges from contemporaries Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix through his interest in pre- and early cinema, referencing and channelling the explorations of photographer Eadweard Muybridge and maintaining a creatively codependent relationship with theatre and circus performer Denis Lavant.

His cinema is also characterised by a desperate search for genuine romance that bled into his off-screen relationships with a number of featured actresses: Mireille Perrier, Juliette Binoche and Katerina Golubeva. The essential Carax moments combine magic and love, such as in Mauvais sang (1986) when Lavant, attempting to woo Binoche, throws a single apple off-screen, only for a barrage of other food to rain down on him. More recently, the filmmaker has reflected on the death and rebirth of cinema through new forms of motion-capture and digital video in Holy Motors (2012), and the adoption of the traditional forms of opera and puppetry in Annette (2021).

This season presents most of Carax’s singular body of work, including the extravagant Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), the rarely seen extended miniseries version of 1999’s Pola X, Pierre ou les ambiguïtiés (2001), and the recent self-portrait It's Not Me (2024), chronicling an outsider who paradoxically remains at the centre of late-20th and early-21st-century cinema.