Sins of the Father: Politics and Patriarchs in the Cinema of Leos Carax (Preview)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

Self-portraiture signifies a retreat from the world into the private space of the self. Take the late self-portraits of Rembrandt. Here is an artist battered by the outside world who excluded that world to concentrate on his face, on mortal flesh, and on a possibly immortal soul.

Leos Carax was sixty-four when his autobiographical essay film It’s Not Me screened at Cannes in May 2024. That is one year older than Rembrandt when he died, and ten years older than the Rembrandt of the Louvre self-portrait that Carax filmed in The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), when he himself was about thirty. He is not far off the sixty-five that his mentor Jean-Luc Godard was when he made his self-portrait film JLG/JLG—Self-Portrait in December (1995). It would not be surprising if Carax in his own self-portrait film It’s Not Me (2024) turned inward since to many skeptics and detractors he has always been self-indulgent and a narcissist—a typical quotation is “I’m not only my films, but I’m pretty much my films.” His previous two features, Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021), include prologues wherein Carax presents himself as a controlling or generating master of ceremonies. His first three films starring Denis Lavant are unofficially named the Alex Trilogy after their main character—the filmmaker’s birth name is Alex Christophe Dupont, his pseudonym Leos Carax incorporates his name “Alex” with “Oscar.” The upper-class world of Pola X (1999) is said to be based on that of Carax’s upbringing. Moreover, the popular conception of Carax is fueled by the clichés of Romantic individualism and self-realization—he is often labeled an enfant terrible or poète maudit, celebrated as a Pythagorean rebel whose obsessive pursuit of an obsessive vision depicting obsessive characters pursuing obsessive goals clashes heroically with the timeserving, penny-pinching, bourgeois-capitalist film establishment.

Fears that It’s Not Me will be rampantly egocentric seem to be confirmed by an interview Carax gives to Henri Sanzot in the film’s press kit. An interview is ideally a dialogue, a conversation, a reaching out beyond the self, an attempt to engage with the world. There is no journalist, film critic, or academic, however, called Henri Sanzot. As any French-speaking reader of Belgian comic-strip artist Hergé will tell you, Sanzot is a character from the Tintin comic books, known as Cutts the Butcher in the English version. You could speculate about why Carax chose this character to name his fake interviewer. Sanzot is a pun on the French sans os, literally “boneless,” but with the connotation of “spineless,” which may be Carax’s take on a profession that has given him a hard time over the years. Indeed, the press furore around and resultant commercial disaster of The Lovers on the Bridge nearly destroyed his career. The fact that Hergé’s Sanzot is a butcher seems relevant to a film that Carax insisted on “cutting” himself, rather than use his longtime editor, Nelly Quettier. In the Tintin comics, Sanzot’s phone number is often confused with that of Tintin and his companions, resulting in botched communications, and a kind of bathetic intrusion of the mundane into the world of the heroic. While such wordplay and intertextual proliferation is certainly a large part of Carax’s approach as a filmmaker, the main thing to note here is that what appeared to be a dialogue is in fact a monologue. In this interview, Carax is talking to himself. His detractors might add—again.

As its contrarian title implies, however, It’s Not Me is no ordinary self-portrait. Despite featuring newly shot and archival images of Carax himself, privileging his “voice” in both commentary and intertitles, and including numerous clips from more than forty years of work, It’s Not Me proves to be the Carax film most open to the world. His most explicitly political film. It also serves as a key to the earlier work and demonstrates that—far from being the ecstatic uninhibited raptures his more uncritical admirers celebrate—Carax’s films have always been firmly grounded in the political. This political underpinning is figured through the one motif that unites the different strands of Carax’s work over four decades—the Father, or, to be precise, the Bad Father.

The key section in It’s Not Me relating to fathers and the political begins with a home movie, probably filmed around 2010. Carax follows his daughter Nastya with his camera as she recounts a dream of being hunted by a shark. She says that her father was unable to stop the shark eating her foot, dispassionately explaining, “You didn’t see.”

Next, an intertitle reads MAUVAIS SANG, meaning “bad blood,” but also the name of Carax’s second feature. It is overlaid with the words PÈRES. BAD BLOOD: FATHERS. This is followed by images from films featuring murderous fathers or father-figures—Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), and Carax’s own Annette. A section on Roman Polanski presents him as a “guy” who survived the death camps, whose family was killed in the Holocaust, whose pregnant wife was murdered, and who sodomized a thirteen-year-old girl.

The intertitle THE MASK OF FEAR introduces a newly filmed sketch wherein his mother reads the young Carax and his sister a bedtime story that treats the Final Solution as a benevolent fairytale. In an earlier montage, Carax had claimed Adolf Hitler as one of his many fathers. Footage from the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, when Jewish protestor Isadore Greenbaum was attacked after protesting on the stage, is followed by a Gallery of Salauds (bastards): Bashar al-Assad, since-deposed president of Syria; Ismail Haniyeh, since-assassinated chairman of Hamas; Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel; U.S. President Donald Trump; French far-right leader Marine le Pen, who leads the National Front party founded by her father Jean-Marie; Kim Jong Un, Supreme Leader of North Korea; Xi Jinping, president of China; and Vladimir Putin, president of Russia. Intertitles read, “They dream of the day when HATE will be able to shout HOORAY!”…

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Darragh O’Donoghue is an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 2