Intro to Film 2025 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

Category: Week 12 (11/10 + 11/12) • Experimental + Art Film

  • Reframing Mulholland Drive as Art Cinema

    SLIGHT SPOILER WARNING

    Reading Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” framed Mulholland Drive for me as something less like a mystery that “should” resolve and more like a work that uses narration itself as its central problem. Bordwell’s description of art cinema highlights how it departs from classical Hollywood storytelling by loosening clear cause and effect, foregrounding style and authorial choice, and inviting the viewer to participate in interpretation rather than simply follow a chain of motivated events. 

    Bordwell’s framework is especially helpful because he describes art cinema as organized around two broad principles: a pull toward realism (psychological complexity, everyday detail, the sense of lived experience) and authorial expressivity (a visible shaping intelligence that can be felt through patterning, symbolism, and deliberate narrative uncertainty). Mulholland Drive constantly oscillates between those principles. On one hand, the film offers “realist” textures, like the awkward industry networking, auditions, and the humiliating vulnerability of wanting to be seen as talented and desirable. On the other hand, Lynch repeatedly interrupts anything that looks like stable plot momentum with sequences that feel like authorial punctuation marks, moments that insist on mood, dread, or formal play more than explanation.

    A good example is how the early portion of the film initially resembles a classical setup: Betty arrives in Los Angeles with an optimistic goal, Rita has amnesia and needs help, and the structure suggests that investigation will restore identity and produce narrative clarity. But Lynch keeps inserting events that do not sit comfortably as steps in a single causal chain. The hitman’s botched assassination plays like dark slapstick, the Cowboy appears as a kind of cryptic herald, and the diner sequence at Winkie’s feels like a self-contained nightmare. If we try to force classical psychological causation onto these moments, they resist it: they carry emotional and thematic weight, but they do not function like clean “clues” in a detective story. Bordwell notes that art cinema often replaces tight causal logic with gaps, digressions, and a more episodic chain of incidents, where motivation can be partial or retrospective. 

    This is where Bordwell’s vocabulary of motivation becomes useful. In classical narration, we tend to assume that everything is motivated in a legible way, usually by character goals and causal logic. Art cinema, as Bordwell describes it, is willing to shift motivation onto other grounds: realism (life is messy), authorial patterning (recurring images, symmetrical scenes), or even uncertainty itself as a guiding principle. Mulholland Drive makes us feel that shift most strongly through repetition and doubling. Names, roles, and relationships fold over each other. Scenes echo earlier scenes with altered emotional meaning, as if the film is less interested in “what happened” than in how desire, guilt, and fantasy can reorganize the same material. Instead of a straight line, the movie feels like a set of refrains.

    Club Silencio is the scene that most explicitly announces this art-cinema contract. The performance insists on emotional truth while simultaneously telling us that the band is not real, that sound and spectacle are produced, that what moves us can be fabrication. Bordwell argues that art cinema often makes authorship palpable, allowing style and narration to comment on themselves and on our habits of spectatorship. Club Silencio does that in a way that feels almost like a thesis statement: the film is warning us not to treat representation as transparent, and it is preparing us for the major narrative rupture that follows.

    That rupture, the shift into Diane’s reality, is where Bordwell’s emphasis on ambiguity becomes the key term. Bordwell describes ambiguity as a dominant principle in art cinema, where the viewer is encouraged to weigh competing explanations rather than receive definitive closure. After the blue box sequence, the film does not neatly label what came before as dream, fantasy, alternate reality, or subjective distortion. Instead, it forces the viewer to move backward and reinterpret. Betty becomes Diane, vitality curdles into resentment, romance becomes exploitation and pain, and earlier images begin to read like displaced wish-fulfillment. This is not simply “confusing for the sake of confusing.” It is a structured reorientation that makes interpretation part of the experience of the film, which is exactly what Bordwell identifies as central to art cinema’s mode of practice. 

  • Holy Motors and Un Chien Andalou

    Last year in my high school French class, I watched Un Chien Andalou for the first time. What I remember most is the shocking scene where a razor slices through a woman’s eye. At the time, I saw it mainly as a bizarre product of avant-garde filmmaking. After our class discussion on Monday, however, I decided to rewatch it and look for deeper meaning in the film as a whole. Seeing it again after Holy Motors made me realize that both films use unsettling and absurd imagery not just to shock the audience, but to challenge how we watch and interpret what’s on screen.

    The eye scene in Un Chien Andalou feels like a direct attack on the viewer’s sense of sight. It is disturbing but also symbolic, as if the film is forcing us to open our eyes to new ways of seeing. Holy Motors captures that same kind of shock with its random bursts of violence, like when Oscar kills a man who turns out to be himself. These scenes might feel random and unnecessary, but that is what makes them effective. They remind us that cinema can still surprise us and that meaning does not always have to come from logic.

    Another parallel that stood out to me is the scene in Un Chien Andalou where a woman is hit by a car. The suspense builds as several cars narrowly miss her before one finally makes contact, and even then, the moment feels completely unprovoked. It reminded me of the quick, jarring deaths in Holy Motors that appear suddenly and are never explained. Both scenes deny viewers any sense of closure or reasoning. Instead, they reveal how unpredictable and empty violence can feel when it is removed from a clear narrative or purpose. Rewatching Un Chien Andalou helped me understand Holy Motors in a new way. Both films go against traditional storytelling, but that confusion is what makes them so captivating. They challenge us to keep watching even when we want to look away or are unsure of what we are supposed to feel.

  • The Writing Process of Holy Motors

    This interview, linked here is a discussion with Leos Carax about his own process developing the twisted ideas behind Holy Motors. Leos Carax described his emotional state when entering the writing process of Holy Motors as “rage”. Having been unable to develop, fund, or shoot a film in years, Carax found himself questioning filming location, language, and methods of funding for future films. That is why, when beginning to write Holy Motors, he found himself writing unconsciously, which I think is very clear in the viewing of the film. As the movie progresses, the viewer gets the feeling that there is an accumulation of something, although its hard to figure out what. Each different “appointment” is separated, yet we feel like each is somehow building on eachother to reach some sort of accumulation. He described writing it as “you don’t react to what you’re doing, you just do it”. For example, he talks about how he initially wanted to play the part of the man with the birthmark in the car, as he was the “director”. However, as the film came together, Carax realized that that character was in fact not the director, but some looming professional, dictating the flow of art, therefore being closer to a producer. Therefore, he replaced himself as the actor with Michel Piccoli. This is a good example of Carax reacting to the film as he creates it, just as he does with most of his films, starting them with combinations of images and seeing what feelings those images invoke.

    Carax goes on to say that Holy Motors stands alone in his filmography, meaning it was not inspired by any of his other films. He views the film as a representation of reality and what it means to be alive, and therefore didn’t want it to have any aspects of a replication of something else. This is a concept I think is extremely interesting, since most directors at least develop some strand of style that stays consistent throughout their films. He goes on to further examine the films themes of performance for performance’s sake and the disappearance of physical film in cinema history, but I interpreted the interview as Carax saying that Holy Motors is about life and how we choose to live it and how difficult it is to be authentic in a digital age.

  • Holy Motors: Merely Players?

    “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players;/ They have their exits and their entrances;/ And one man in his time plays many parts” (Shakespeare, As You Like It).

    I think the world is a stage in Holy Motors. The limo is like backstage, with the Hollywood vanity mirror, costumes, and makeup. We even hear Oscar practicing a line that he later says in the hilarious death scene with “Léa” (Élise). Maybe hilarious isn’t the right word, but I enjoyed a hearty snigger at the obvious theatricality and melodrama of the interaction. Once I got into it, I liked this movie a lot. I could start to predict things— of course Oscar was going to get up and go on after being shot multiple times in the torso! After all, he had just come back from being stabbed in the neck. I saw echoes— while the connecting door in the hotel wasn’t technically a hidden door, it had a similar feel. Add a man, in bed, with a dog? It reminded me of the opening sequence. I felt like I was playing a video game where I was finally starting to make sense of the world, the rules, and the themes. For me, watching this film was a weird and wonderful experience. 


    A scene that stood out to me was when Oscar and the concerned guy from the agency talked in the limo. According to my notes, they discussed how small and imperceptible cameras have become, Oscar’s believability to his watchers, and the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I started to watch this movie as if every time Oscar stepped out of the limo, out of the liminal, interior space where he could be honest and authentic, he was participating in a piece of performance art— perhaps even acting for a camera we can’t see. We as watchers had a choice to believe or not to believe what we were seeing. And while I think I constructed a somewhat plausible explanation for what was literally happening in the movie— a professional actor going from gig to gig to film short scenes— that was just a way to force the film into a narrative I could wrap my head around. But the “literally,” the what’s-really-happening, my made-up, interpretive narrative isn’t what matters. I think the limo driver putting on a mask before stepping out asks us to recognize that all humans grapple with the actor’s struggle: we all struggle to define ourselves, to disentangle and distinguish ourselves from the many roles we play. 

  • Holy Motors and the Disappearing Reality

    Holy Motors feels like a film about film itself, or maybe about what’s left of it. Léos Carax immerses us in a world where the boundaries between performance and reality are blurred. Mr. Oscar (played by Denis Lavant) moves from one “appointment” to another, assuming new identities in each, yet there’s no visible audience or camera to justify his transformations. That absence makes the performances feel strangely hollow, as if he’s acting purely because he has to – a slave to the “invisible machines” Carax mentions in his interview.

    Carax’s distrust of digital technology seems to haunt every scene. The old “visible machines” of cinema (cameras, projectors, cars) are fading, replaced by something more virtual, impersonal. Even the limo, which carries Oscar between his appointments, becomes a symbol of this transition: a kind of impossible, in-between space where he prepares to become someone else. It’s home, but not in the comforting sense. It’s more like a place of regression or exhaustion after too many lives lived.

    As an experimental film, Holy Motors rejects conventional storytelling. It doesn’t explain itself. Instead, it drifts through moods and genres (e.g., tragedy, absurdity, musical, horror) like flipping through channels on TV. The accordion interlude midway through feels like the only true burst of life. It’s spontaneous and rhythmic, feels almost rebellious against the film’s growing artificiality.

    Is Mr. Oscar an actor, or just a person conditioned by an over-mediated world? How does the film comment on our relationship to technology and authenticity? If the limo is “home,” what does that say about the way we live between screens, constantly switching roles?

  • Holy Motors: I Laughed More Than I Think I Was Supposed To

    Holy Motors was 100x more strange & confusing than I imagined it would be, even after Professor Zinman’s cautionary introduction of the film. I can genuinely recall at least a dozen times where I out loud said to myself while watching “what the heck is going on”; & honestly, I still don’t know. Maybe that’s why I found the film so entertaining to watch – because I was so utterly lost the entire time that all I could do was laugh. I’m guessing that wasn’t everyone else’s first impression, which is valid since there was obviously a lot of violent & strangely dark stuff occurring throughout the movie as well, but around half way through the movie I accepted that it wouldn’t make any sense to me, so I just decided to laugh through the confusion. In honor of that, instead of attempting to do a probably unsuccessful analysis of what Carax was trying to say with this film, I thought it would be more enjoyable to reflect on some of my favorite funny (kind of) moments of Holy Motors that I had from our viewing.

    This scene for me definitely set the stage for the rest of the weirdness that I was about to witness in this movie. I was quite uncomfortable watching the other parts of this scene, but when the animation came on I just lost it. This was my first memorable “what the heck is happening?” & laugh it off, because still thinking back to it, what the heck was I watching.

    This scene was actually funny; certainly strange, but funny. Other parts got a quick laugh out of me, but Monsieur Oscar eating the flowers & then eating the girls fingers was so uncalled for that I was laughing the entire time. Was the girls fingers getting eaten funny? No. But the randomness of it? Absolutely. I’ve got to hand it to Carax because this was by far one of the oddest scenes that I’ve ever seen but I loved it.

    Like any typical movie, what do we do after a long hour & a half of fake killing people & slowly dying? Break out into singing of course! Just when I felt like I had a grip on what kind of movie this was, I get caught off guard by a musical number. I definitely didn’t hate it, but just another “where did this come from” with a laugh.

    I felt like this was a fabulous ending to the movie & it definitely helped me put into perspective what message that Carax was trying to convey, but talking cars was far from how I imagined he would do it. Very clever, & it got a chuckle out of me too – 10/10, no notes.

    My biggest question throughout the duration of the whole film was how were we supposed to differentiate between what was real or not? Or was any of it real? Specifically in the scene with his daughter in the car, it felt real & I thought that it was him outside of his work life, but who actually knows because there weren’t any cameras to be seen to help me figure out what was acting & what wasn’t.

  • Holy Weird

    When watching this film, the only question circling through my mind consistently was – “What is going on right now.” Before the film we were all prepped with the notion that you may leave this film having absolutely no clue what the point of it was, instead of taking that as a suggestion I took it as a challenge. Throughout the screening I consistently wrote in my notes what I thought it was about and where it could possibly be going and every time I did that, the next scene would be something I would have never expected. This feeling of shock after feeling like I was getting a grip on what was going on stood out to me the most when he was dressed as a leprechaun and then genuinely bit that woman’s finger off. I was appalled and totally confused.

    After the screening, I walked back to my dorm in the cold and I still was trying to wrap my head around what I just saw. I came to 3 conclusions. The only consistent thing in that movie was his emotions in the car. We saw this through the moments where he was taking off his masks and clothes and he would smoke a cigarette or just simply look pretty aimless. It was clear that he was simply a prop. At the beginning of this screening I remember hearing that this was a movie about an actor, post screening I thought that this was a film that tried to encompass the emotions performers feel as the characters they portray consume their lives. Because if you think about it, how many times have you watched a movie with an actor and simply started to refer to that actor as the character they played. Even though the filming is “over” they cannot escape the role, which probably leads to identity issues like he faced within the car and spells of depression.

    My next conclusion was that he was able to play these roles by murdering these people who looked like him and taking their spots but the death of one of his roles comes from framing the dead character he is taking to look like how he looked before. That became clear to me after we watched him kill the guy and started framing him to look like how he looked currently. That was trippy. In that moment I felt like I was watching someone try to explain phases of emotions and life. When someone is “reborn”, which is a common phrase nowadays as people seek restarting more and more, what does that entail? Does it mean completely killing that version of yourself and beginning to be someone new? Thats the question that swirled through my head while watching him lie next to himself while bleeding out.

    My final conclusion was that this was a commentary on beauty standards and unrealistic expectations. While watching the VERY weird scene with the leprechaun and then finally seeing the dedication at the end, it was like a lightbulb went off in my head. Every character that he played was distinctly different, some were crazy, some were completely normal, and some were old rich men and gangsters, he put himself in every “shoe” possible; while still at his core being the same guy. When I saw the scene of him smoking a cigarette with this model and her taking off her wig and letting her hair out while being literally underground, it made me think that this movie was about who we would be if nobody knew who we were? We technically would be free to be whoever we wanted, we could be deranged or rich or an accordion player, because nobody would be there to police us or critique us on how we live our lives. As he covered the model in a traditional burqa I thought, “now this is insane, because he saw her a bit nude he decided she would look best fully covered? ” Unfortunately upon further thinking I believe I missed the mark initially. I believe this scene was about expectation and recognizing the comfort in not having to worry about how you look since you are covered, something that directly contrasted her entire livelihood as a model. When he laid next to her nude and she sang to him, I thought it was a continuation of the “search for a perfect photo” with both of them that was previously brought up as the photographer tried to pull him from the crowd. Two very different people, however at the core, not very different at all. Both are covered, one by a burqa and one by an absolutely fake persona. Both underground, both vulnerable, and two people who (based off how quickly she took off her wig) don’t feel like themselves during their jobs.

    Based on my conclusions and the dedication, I feel a bit qualified to take a shot at what I believe this movie is about. Though I believe it does touch on multiple things, I think it was about how one can find comfort in not having any harsh expectations set for them, and in turn who we become when we are being watched vs we feel like we aren’t being watched at all. We hear this when Mr.Oscar expresses disinterest in his job because he feels like the cameras are “too small”, how they used to be bigger than our heads, but now they are so small we can’t even see them anymore. I believe this was also a comment about being watched/ judged, I think his company wasn’t for movies- I think it was to create spectacle for people so they could have something to film and post. I think the “too small cameras” are eyes. A part of me thinks he is also being exploited. Which could be another theme of this movie(actor exploitation) since he talks about how he once acted and is met with a lack of interest. Confirming that the world now is his “stage” meaning he is performing all the time. Many actors face this as they get bombarded by paparazzi just going on walks. He faces an extreme lack of comfort, based on the movie we never see him stop. We saw him only really relax when he was underground with the model, in bed playing an old dying man, and when he was inside the car. Whenever he came out the car, peopled filmed what he did, stared at him, or left with a story to tell. So to conclude, even though I could talk about this longer, I believe this was a critique on what we as people do when we are being viewed, it also implores you to think about who you would be if nobody saw you at all.

  • Holy Perspective

    Holy Motors is a film that takes the concept of perception and viewing yourself from someone else’s point of view, analyzing how differently your behaviors and mannerisms change based on who you are interacting with. Upon viewing the first couple of minutes of the movie, I thought the plot and understanding of the movie’s progression would be easy to follow. However, as the movie continued past its opening scene, things started to get a little interesting. The main character is tasked with juggling nine appointments throughout the film, where each appointment requires him to not only drastically change his appearance but also shift the way he carries himself and interacts with each individual.

    holy motors | ombre

    We see him go from an actor in a developing video game to a hostile leprechaun, all while only making these adjustments in the limo he is being driven around in. One thing that truly stuck out to me was the scene when he was tasked with essentially assassinating someone, and in the end, the person ended up being himself in a different costume. After completing the task, he proceeds to change the seemingly lifeless body out of its current attire and make it look more like what he was currently wearing. In the end, the body ends up coming back to life and killing him. While a lot of things in this movie did not make much sense to me, the question I propose is: throughout all the appointments and costume changes, what do you think him essentially killing himself represents in the context of this movie being based on one’s perspective of you?

  • Leos Carax in the short “my last minute”

    After watching Holy Motors today, I had to see what else the director, Leos Carax, had out there for me to watch. I found that, in addition to notable feature films like Boy Meets Girl and Annette, he’s also known for his shorts. I watched “my last minute,” which is a 1-minute short film commissioned by the Vienna Film Festival.

    CONTENT WARNING FOR GRAPHIC AND SHORT DEPICTION OF SUICIDE AND DRUG ABUSE: I will also be discussing this content in the blog post.

    A defining factor of underground film is the lack of sense or characterized motivation for a character’s actions. In this short, the character depicted lights a cigarette, then immediately goes to his laptop, which is on an open Word document, and types “tonight, I stop smoking.”

    Then, he puts out his cigarette, and quickly opens a drawer at his desk, grabs a gun, and shoots himself in the head. This is also a seemingly uncharacteristic, or at least absurd, action. The scene moves quickly in this small minute, and the character moves without hesitation. What I found most interesting and relevant to Holy Motors is the final thirteen seconds of the short.

    It’s a quick sequence of a toddler, presumably the character when he was much younger. The child has its mouth open, we hear static, the frame zooms in on the child, and then black. This reminded me of Holy Motors a lot because of its quick transition time. In our class feature, it was sometimes hard to tell what was true to Oscar’s life and what was an appointment. With this short, we can see Carax’s tendency for quick, sensational directional choices with the character’s spontaneous actions. Additionally, we see a tendency for playing with graphic quality of his images in both, controlling colors as well as clarity to influence the viewer’s experience.

  • “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” and “The Hangover”

    David Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” defines art cinema as a distinct mode that rejects classical Hollywood conventions of linear storytelling, defined cause and effect, and psychological clarity. Rather, it emphasizes realism, authorial expressivity, and ambiguity. Bordwell writes about how art films often feature psychologically complex characters, loosely structured narratives, and situations that don’t come to complete resolution. He argues that art cinema films, while more complex, actually present a more realistic version of reality by incorporating the deep complexities and problems left unsolved that frequently occur in real life.

    A film I watched recently is The Hangover (2009), and while the movie is definitely a mainstream Hollywood comedy, it’s interesting to think about how the film adapts specific techniques from the art cinema style. Bordwell writes, “Just as the Hollywood silent cinema borrowed avant-garde devices but as-
    similated them to narrative ends, so recent American filmmaking has appropriated art-film devices”, talking about how mainstream Hollywood films incorporate elements of art cinema. He goes on to list specific examples such as the open ending of Five Easy Pieces (1970) or the “psychological ambiguity” of The Conversation (1974).

    The structure of The Hangover disrupts the typical cause-effect style of classical narrative cinema. All the events of the story are told out of order to keep the mystery of what happened that night alive, and the viewer is subject to extreme restricted narration. The film opens on the day of the wedding, near the end of the actual story, when the groomsmen call the bride to admit they lost the Doug (the groom). From there, the story cuts to two days previous to that as the boys are shown embarking on Doug’s bachelor party. Finally, the film cuts from the beginning of the night right to the chaotic morning after the party, where Doug is missing and no one can remember a thing from the night before.

    This non-linear structure immediately places the audience in a state of confusion and curiosity, mirroring the characters’ own disorientation. Similar to the art cinema Bordwell describes, the film asks viewers to piece together what happened through fragments of memory, visual clues, and subjective perspectives.