Forever Alex: Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me (C’est pas moi, 2024)

Carax suggests that the constant availability of images as immaterial streams – reduced to binary code and accessible through handheld devices – has diminished their impact. One of the film’s central questions is this: why, in an age of image hyper-saturation and near-instant access to vast reservoirs of information, do so many remain willfully blind to injustices and atrocities, both micro and macro in scale? Among Carax’s tentative answers (he resists treating any as definitive) is the idea that the dematerialisation of images has eroded their elemental power.

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When it was announced that Leos Carax would venture into the musical genre with Annette (2022), it seemed a natural step in his artistic evolution. Across this idiosyncratic auteur’s body of work, he has demonstrated a fascination with spectacle, set-pieces, and overpowering imagery that eclipses his interest in maintaining a cohesive and logical narrative structure. Although films like Boy Meets Girl (1984), Mauvais Sang (1986), and The Lovers on the Bridge (1991) have linear plots, each is characterised by a fragmented, stop-start rhythm, prioritising tangents and asides over plot progression. With Holy Motors, Carax abandoned traditional narrative scaffolding entirely, stitching together a series of skits that vary wildly in tone and genre, unified solely by the presence of Mr. Oscar (Denis Lavant), a versatile actor enacting scenarios in various disguises for an endless roster of unseen clients. Furthermore, many of the most iconic scenes in his oeuvre – such as the centrepiece accordion performance in Holy Motors (2012) and the oft-referenced “Modern Love” sprint in Mauvais Sang – are themselves musical eruptions that can be removed from their surrounding context to function equally as effectively as self-contained musical sequences. All these factors, combined with Carax’s aesthetic maximalism and sense of romanticism, made his transition to musicals unsurprising, and the result felt wholly of a piece with his preceding films.

Similarly, his recent decision to produce an essay film of substantial length feels somewhat inevitable. While most of Carax’s films can broadly be described as narrative fiction, his work undoubtedly exhibits characteristics of the essayistic tradition: intertextuality, resistance to conventional genre classifications, fragmented structures, a compulsion to destabilise diegetic illusion (in the opening sequence of Annette, for example, the key cast and crew address the audience directly, playfully acknowledging budgetary constraints and pleading with us not to be too harsh on the film, as the authors are “a little vain”). Carax has also always demonstrated a long-standing interest in self-representation, either through projecting elements of his off-screen persona onto fictional protagonists (usually played by Lavant and given Carax’s real birth name, “Alex”), or through physically appearing on screen to present the film, as in the opening sequences of Annette and Holy Motors. The fact that many of Carax’s oft-claimed major influences were towering figures in essay filmmaking – most notably, Jean-Luc Godard, whose adaptation of King Lear (1987) Carax appears in, and Artavazd Peleshian –further cements the link between Carax and this form.

Despite this, the only feature Carax directed prior to It’s Not Me (2024) that can be described in unambiguous terms as an essay film is Sans Titre (1997), an 8½-minute short commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival. Tasked with “giving some news of himself.” Carax responded with a hyper-kinetic mosaic of picture and sound, cryptically combining images of the festival’s history, natural disasters, home video footage, and excerpts from feature films such as The Night of the Hunter (1955) and The Crowd (1928). These images are interspersed with sparse pieces of Carax himself in a bedroom, lying in bed or working at his monitor, as though the montage represents a stream-of-consciousness directly emanating from his mind.

Nearly 30 years later, It’s Not Me builds on the roots of Sans Titre but offers a more mature, accomplished vision. Carax’s new film is a self-reflexive essayistic exploration of Carax’s life, career, and place in cinema history, constructed almost entirely out of repurposed archival material. Reflections on contemporary tragedies intermingle with Carax’s reflections on his artistic influences, working and professional relationships, and thoughts on the future of cinema.

As Carax explains via voice-over early in the film, It’s Not Me originated as a commission from the Centre Pompidou to answer the question, “Who are you, Leos Carax?” Though the associated exhibition never materialised, Carax continued production, even though, as he humbly confesses early into the film, he is still unsure of the answer. If the film can be described as a self-portrait, it’s one in the expanded sense: it doesn’t proceed in any linear order, doesn’t clearly recount any precise details from Carax’s life, and the filmmaker himself is rarely on screen. Instead, the film riffs on several subjects that are clearly important to the director, using a wide breadth of cited audiovisual materials to visualise his thoughts in action. There are some images from Carax’s own films, along with behind-the-scenes footage and home movies, but these don’t take precedence; instead, they are observed in a wider current that includes, amongst others, clips from Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Vertigo (1958), Bigger Than Life (1956), The Immigrant (1917), Germany Year Zero (1948), The Night of the Hunter, songs by David Bowie, Nina Simone, Sparks, and Dmitri Shostakovich, and countless still images. If Carax is inscribed in the film, it’s through his raspy voice-over narration, which not only voices his intellectual concerns but also has the effect of framing the dense footage so that it seems to be visualising his thought in action.

Carax’s conception of self-portraiture, therefore, is essayistic in the truest sense. The term “essay,” as understood today, stems from Montaigne’s use of the French term “essai,” or “essayer,” in his book Essais (1580). In the book, a collection of short pieces present Montaigne’s thoughts on varied subjects, including the state of the French educational system, the ethics of cannibalism, healthcare, and the legacy of European colonialism, while the author asserts that the book as a whole constitutes a self-portrait. For Montaigne, self-representation did not involve recounting lived experience but laying bare the flow of his mental activity as he wrote, detailing to the reader every aspect of thought as he conducted his intellectual voyages – tangents, digressions, and unresolved tensions included. As Rick Warner writes, “what [Montaigne] wants his book to possess is the volatile and digressive character of his thinking process, even if this means allowing errors and rushed observations to stand, and even if this risks losing the reader . . . in a jumble of seemingly misleading reflections . . . he wishes to paint transience and transition, a self embroiled in the turbulent flow of thought.”1 The Montaignian essay, then, exists as an open textual space in which the nature of the self isn’t articulated as a static empirical being but as a constantly shifting, fluid entity, a self that is always caught up in the flux of thought and sensorial reaction.

Like Montaigne, Carax isn’t interested in presenting a fixed and stable portrait of himself based on physical likeness or biographical incident, but to offer the viewer his uninterrupted stream of thought. Just as Montaigne provides no clear-cut conclusions to the many issues he grapples with (at one point, he tells the reader, “If my soul [âme] could only find a firm footing, I would not be essaying myself but resolving myself”), Carax’s filmmaking here is open and fluid, offering many inquiries into varied subjects but refusing to offer straightforward resolutions.2

It must be noted that Carax’s extensive use of images produced by other artists doesn’t mean the film is any less personal; indeed, Montaigne himself heavily used intertextuality when constructing his literary self-portrait, either pulling quotes from existing authors or paraphrasing their ideas at length (sometimes with clear attribution and sometimes not). Rather than viewing intertextuality as a threat to the authenticity of his self-portrait, Montaigne integrates these borrowed elements into the fabric of his essays, making them part of his intellectual substance. As Warner argues, “by shifting the relation from matters of likeness (i.e., imitation, mimesis) to generation, he offsets his concerns that his Essais are perhaps too greatly indebted to other authors,” and, in doing so, Montaigne “reminds his readers that he but ‘lightly touches’ prior authors and ‘tweaks’ what he takes from them so that their thoughts ‘decorate’ and ‘support’ his own.”3 In Montaigne’s view, openly engaging with fragments from texts that had a significant impact on him was an essential part of his communication with the reader. Montaigne drew extensively from the great variety of works that influenced him, but in doing so fragmented and recombined them to produce a new unity from the various scraps. Doing so in the full view of the reader allowed them to better understand his artistic process, thus giving them the chance to view the world through his own mode of perception.

Like Montaigne, Carax engages heavily with the cinematic texts and filmmakers that shaped his philosophy of art and life, plunging the viewer into a kind of audiovisual unconscious, and in so doing, allows for the uniqueness of his individual creative vision to emerge. For an artist as cinephiliac as Carax, to properly represent himself, it is vital to delve into the cinematic images that constantly swirl through his mind as points of obsession. The widely allusive nature of It’s Not Me, therefore, is firmly in line with Montaigne’s conception of the self not as a fully autonomous, fixed entity but as something constantly changing and responding to varied external factors and influences.

There has always been an element of self-conscious performance to Carax’s self-portrayals – whether it’s enacting a fictional scenario in which he discovers a portal to the cinema in his hotel room in Holy Motors, leading a recording session that splinters the line between diegetic and non-diegetic sound as the performers step away from the instruments they were supposedly playing live in Annette, or acting out his own suicide in the short film My Last Minute (2006). Rather than offering a straightforward documentary snapshot, he creatively uses cinema’s fantastical qualities to delve into the essence of Carax: his work doesn’t create a dichotomy between private and public life, between real-world experience and artistic creation, between the art he produced and the art by other authors he has consumed. Instead, all these surface level distinctions are destabilised.

As its title suggests, with It’s Not Me, Carax creates his fullest and most complex meditation on authorship. The film signals its playful engagement with self-portraiture from the outset. After recounting the film’s commission via voice-over, Carax appears in bed, reading. After a moment, he switches off the light, and we see the space through an infrared camera: the concrete contours of Carax break down into a semi-abstract wash of greens, reds, and blues. This device underscores the inherent elusiveness of biographical representation: no image of Carax can wholly capture the individual; there are several different ways in which he can be portrayed on film, and each one of these interpretations will be as valid as any other. It’s Not Me does not give us an unproblematic snapshot of “Carax,” because no film can capture the entire life of a human being; every film, no matter how assertive its claim to mimetic realism, fragments, compresses, and obscures. Carax, then, openly makes this process clear, embracing the imperfect nature of biographical representation and offering us many entry points into “Carax.”

Following this sequence, Carax plays with the tension between presence and absence further, showing an archival shot of a crowd in an unspecified location, with no clear figure taking precedence over any others, and narrating, “there, that’s my father.” Just as the viewer may be scanning the faces in the image to glean which one most clearly resembles Carax, the filmmaker deliberately frustrates our perception: “No, not him. Him. But no, not there.” He then cuts to still images of several of his artistic influences, including Dostoevsky and Godard, with each cut asserting that each one is his father. Carax then cuts to a series of shots of images of children from various formative films, such as Germany Year Zero and The Night of the Hunter, commenting that they represent his younger self. Arousing the viewer’s desire for biographical detail before forcefully denying it, Carax offers a pointed rebuke to a form of criticism that seeks to understand an artist’s work through the lens of their personal life, instead suggesting that the art he consumed throughout his childhood played just as an important – if not a more important – role in shaping him as did his actual family members and immediate experiences.

Despite its intellectual rigor, It’s Not Me brims with humour and humility. In one scene, Carax shows himself running toward a camera, deadpanning, “And here is me, running towards my destiny,” only to slip on ice. This moment encapsulates the film’s ethos: the auteur as fallible, uncertain, and perpetually in flux, working through his concerns with playful experimentation rather than definitive answers. If there is a singular, overarching theme running through It’s Not Me, it is the question of the artist’s role in modern society. The narrative moves seamlessly from deeply personal history to the geopolitical crises of the 20th century and the urgent challenges of the contemporary moment. This is made strikingly evident in a powerful sequence approximately ten minutes into the film where Carax juxtaposes images of modern-day atrocities with those of historical violence. Footage of a Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden in 1939 is placed alongside contemporary images of refugee children, their lifeless bodies washed ashore on the Mediterranean. This montage progresses to a series of portraits of authoritarian leaders, both historical and contemporary: Adolf Hitler and Fritz Julius Kuhn are presented alongside figures such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Marine Le Pen. While the sequence may lack the political specificity that gives Godard’s archival montages their incisive edge, Carax’s commentary resonates through its profound engagement with his own deeply personal dilemmas as an artist.

The sequence begins with a fictionalised scene depicting a mother in Nazi Germany reading a bedtime story to her children. The story, a fable rooted in the rhetoric of the Final Solution, casts the Jewish population as “wicked people” who must be eradicated and praises Hitler for devising a system of mass extermination. Dehumanising illustrations accompany the tale, reinforcing its grotesque message. The implications are stark: the history of Western cinema – an art form that has profoundly shaped Carax’s own sensibilities – is inextricably linked to the machinery of historical atrocities. Moreover, the materially wealthy nations that provide the funding for Carax’s films remain complicit in the perpetuation of mass-scale violence. The bedtime story’s soothing function hinges on the systematic dehumanisation of an entire people, absolving the collective guilt of a privileged class whose lavish lifestyles were built on mass extermination. Carax thus provocatively suggests a parallel to the romanticised images of Europe perpetuated by classic cinema – idealised visions that obscure the violence committed in the name of Western capital.

In keeping with the essayistic tradition, Carax does not seek to resolve these tensions through easy answers and simple conclusions. Theodor Adorno, in his reflections on the form, argues that the radical potential of the essay lies in its ability to create an “open intellectual experience” which founded on a “constructed juxtaposition of elements,” whose “transitions disavow rigid deduction in the interest of establishing internal cross-connections, something for which discursive logic has no use” (170). Unlike conventional scientific argumentation, which begins with a clear thesis and then seeks to prove it through step-by-step reasoning and the logical progression of ideas, the essay, in its purest form, coordinates various ideas and propositions contrapuntally, so as to create productive points of intellectual conflict. As Adorno continues, the essay “thinks in fragments, just as reality is fragmented, and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over” (164).4 Following a similar conception of the essay, Carax presents his thoughts openly and unflinchingly, grappling with contradictions, ambivalences, and unresolved anxieties. Carax leaves his voyage open-ended, letting the spectator perform the intellectual labour of working through the fissures in the shared determination of meaning.

Beyond interrogating the artist’s political responsibilities in a fractured world, Carax also reflects on the nature of images in the hyper-accelerated, tech-saturated digital age. Toward the film’s conclusion, he remarks that if humans did not blink, “our eyes would quickly dry, and we would go blind.” He then adds that in the 21st century, images arrive in such a “continuous flow” that they “no longer breathe, no longer blink several times a second. They seek to make us blind.” Carax suggests that the constant availability of images as immaterial streams – reduced to binary code and accessible through handheld devices – has diminished their impact. One of the film’s central questions is this: why, in an age of image hyper-saturation and near-instant access to vast reservoirs of information, do so many remain willfully blind to injustices and atrocities, both micro and macro in scale? Among Carax’s tentative answers (he resists treating any as definitive) is the idea that the dematerialisation of images has eroded their elemental power.

Throughout the film, Carax repeatedly returns to images of his daughter, Nastya, at different stages of her life: from strolling on the Pont Neuf bridge as a young child to playing the theme from The Young Girls of Rochefort on the piano as an adult. These tender, intimate images are juxtaposed with depictions of monstrous father figures – James Mason in Bigger Than Life (1956), Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, and Adam Driver in Carax’s own Annette. At first glance, the pairing may seem incongruous, even jarring. Yet, within the film’s broader schema, the implication becomes clear: Carax expresses a profound anxiety about the world he is leaving behind for Nastya and, by extension, the entire younger generation: a world on the brink of environmental collapse and large-scale warfare, where the art that once inspired wonder is increasingly subsumed into the algorithmic content mill. Over a grainy, low-resolution black-and-white image of the earth’s rotation – a shot whose degraded quality evokes a sense of apocalyptic foreboding – Carax coughs, his voice frail, and quotes Hamlet: “The time is out of joint – O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” In true Carax fashion, the quote captures at once a sense of immense artistic hubris and a playful, self-reflexive acknowledgment of the absurdity of his own overreach.

In one striking sequence, Carax overlays a tracking shot from Murnau’s Sunrise – a protagonist wandering through fog-shrouded countryside – with onscreen text posing a pressing question:

In the beginning, when grips pushed the camera on its heavy cart to follow a man, one had the feeling that GOD was following the man with His heavy eyes. But today, if a boy follows his girlfriend with his cellphone camera, that feeling won’t be there. How to reclaim the gaze of the gods?

This meditation on cinema’s lost aura captures the tension between past and present. While early tracking shots required the careful calibration of cumbersome equipment and detailed planning, we can now capture motion images in crisp high definition with tiny devices stored in our pockets. While viewers would once consume the images in a darkened theatre with their undivided attention, new audiences are constantly interacting with a wide breadth of images on a variety of portable devices. Carax’s nostalgia in this sequence recalls the poetic ending of Holy Motors, in which a sentient limo mournfully predicted that it will soon be sent to the scrapyard: “the age of visible machines is over.” And yet Carax isn’t fatalistic. In fact, he is driven by a pressing desire to recapture the awe and wonder of the early cinematic pioneers, to create genuinely striking and powerful images in a world packed with disposable ones.

Elsewhere in the film, Carax places side-by-side images from his own films with the silent films that inspired him. At one point, he compares several early motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge with shots of intense physical motion in his digitally shot Holy Motors, in which Denis Lavant sprints forward wearing a motion capture suit, against a green screen on which different computer-generated landscapes are projected. This contrast isn’t just intended to suggest a qualitative judgement, pitting the ostensible “purity” of analog production against the disposability of digital production; it’s part of an intense consideration of how the tools that are threatening the continued relevance and power of cinema may be utilised to re-enshrine the image with a new sense of the sublime.

These themes are brought into focus in the euphoric epilog of It’s Not Me, a burst of pure energy that ingeniously combines elements of three Carax films: the opening image of Carax’s feature debut, Boy Meets Girl, depicting a bedroom wall decorated with images of glow-in-the-dark stars (the illusion of the depth and infinity of the night sky created on a flat surface – a fitting metaphor for cinema itself), dissolves into a shot of the marionette puppet Baby Annette recreating the iconic “Modern Love” sequence from Carax’s breakout film Mauvais Sang. Unlike in Annette, however, the puppet’s movements are laid bare, revealing the puppeteers and the treadmill beneath. This interplay of illusion and deconstruction embodies his artistic ethos. By the film’s conclusion, the question posed to Carax by the Centre Pompidou remains unresolved, but the journey provides an unvarnished window into the filmmaker’s complex worldview.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.