Just as the definition says, experimental film is cinema made outside of the film industry on an artisanal basis, largely without regard to the structures and demands of traditional narrative film. According to last week’s reading, experimental films challenge normal notions and are recognizable by their efforts at self expression or experimentation outside mainstream cinema. 

In The art cinema as a mode of film practice, Bordwell argues that art cinema is a distinct mode of film practice with a set of formal conventions and its own implicit viewing procedure. Different from classical cinema that has narrative forms motivating cinematic representation with cause-effect logic and psychologically defined goal orientated characters, art cinema is related with ambiguity of meaning, personal experience and emotions of filmmakers, lack of clear targets of characters and unresolved endings. Besides casual narratives, art cinema narratives by realism with real locations, problems, characters, and the filmmaker erases the characters’ clearly-defined goals, merging “a both objective and subjective verisimilitude”. Another very important concept he brings is that he assigns the author as the structure in the film’s system, as the overriding intelligence organizing the film for comprehension. The influence of the author in the organization of the film is to lead the viewers to the recognition of stylistic signatures in the narration, focusing on the ability of each individual to decode the thought process he has generated in the film and finally giving out their own viewpoints. Thus in Bordwell’s eyes, art films are ambiguous because it is not clear if the plot is meant to be read as motivated by the character or the author, and this lead to interpretation by the viewers themselves is what makes the films charming. In the last part of the reading, Bordwell introduces the origin and development of art cinema, and points out that “art cinema softened modernism’s attack on narrative causality using reality”. However, Bordwell also says that some films combine formal principles from both classical narrative cinema and art cinema. My question is, what are the lines of distinction between classical narrative films, art films and films in between?

The reading Interview with Leos Carax tells a lot about Carax’s initial idea about the film Holy Motor, which helps us understand why he films this way and what themes he wants to present. The film itself contains a great deal of the director’s personal emotions about his experiences and feelings about life and death, the film industry, about capital, about the order of society and the future of the world, and about the helplessness of many of the life forces. The greatest concern of Carax is focusing on the film industry itself. He unabashedly criticized that films are losing vitality as Holy Motor opens with the man entering the room only to find the entire audience frozen and keeping eyes shut when facing him. This seems to indicate that the cinema has lost the interest of its audience. Cinema is sacred to Leo Carax, for whom the large film camera is a totem that cannot be replaced by digital photography. Like in the interview he said:“All of it made possible by digital cameras, which I despise (they are imposing themselves or being imposed on us), but which seem to reassure everyone.” There are also plenty of corresponding moments in the film, such as the dialogue in the car shop at the end of the film: “Humans don’t want the existing machinery anymore, they don’t want the engine anymore…” This conveys the director’s own anxiety about the current situation of the film and a metaphor for the theme of “loss”, which is a very personal emotion. What he describes about the stretch limousines appearing in the film is that “They’re outdated, like the old futurist toys of the past”, which he believes “mark the end of an era, the era of large, visible machines.” He explicitly points out that humans and their machines are becoming “slaves to an increasingly virtual world”. He also brings up the question about his worries on human belongings in the future: where should we call home? Our computers? 

The whole film, just like what describes experimental and art films as a whole, is ambiguous. There are so many moments in the film that are lyrical about Carax’s own emotions and experiences, not all of which the audience can relate to, but that’s what he’s going for. He longs for his audience to be able to discover for themselves the motivations of the characters in a film that has no purpose, little relationship, no unified narrative, no cause and effect, and still expects the real life that lies behind it. Just as the reasons for our lives are becoming more and more ambiguous in real life, films that discuss the philosophy of life make us all the more willing to search for the true meaning of life.