Intro to Film 2026 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

  • Viewer: Holy Motors

    I walked into the film with the understanding that it was more or less going to be about performance in our everyday lives. I, however, was not prepared to see how Leos Carax would depict this. During Jean’s musical sequence, she repeats, “Who are we? Who have we become? Who were we when we knew who we were?” This summed up the overall message that Leos Carax is seemingly attempting to convey. In the world of the film, people have lost themselves. Mr. Oscar transforms from one person into the next as he goes through his appointments, but he does so in such a way that his actual identity becomes unrecognizable. The version of Mr. Oscar leaving a large modern house is not his true self, and neither is that of him in the car with his supposed daughter. This alludes to the idea that humans do not have a continuous, stable identity. We are always performing in our lives, adapting ourselves for each individual we come across. Like Mr. Oscar, humans have become, and possibly always have been a mere collection of roles. Even when we think we know who we are, we are simply putting up an act for each context we find ourselves in. After Jean sings this score, she commits suicide. The film never explains this, but I interpreted it as a critique of life without a stable identity. Jean goes from act to act, losing any sense of identity in the process. It seems to ask viewers what the purpose of life is if we have no understanding of who we are.

    The film opens with a view of a sleeping audience in a theater. This seems to point toward the gradual death of classical cinema. There is no active audience anymore, nor is there a clear representation of what is an act of performance and what is real life. There is no active spectatorship, rather, life is always a performance. As cinema has transformed, it no longer serves as a refuge from our daily lives, but it has possibly become our lives.

    In the limousine, Mr. Oscar utters, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if there is no beholder?” Mr. Oscar is saying that without an audience, identity has no grounding foundation. Beauty is only created when there is an active audience, but what happens when this disappears? The Merde scene, where Mr. Oscar has turned into someone unrecognizable reminds viewers that there is no stable self below the performance when no one appears to be watching. If identity depends on an audience, there may be nothing without a beholder.

    At the beginning of the film, Mr. Oscar mentions how he has nine appointments scheduled for the day. As the film progressed, I could not pinpoint Mr. Oscar’s true self. This is what the film directly stresses, we have no true core self. How did you feel when you realized any perception of what we perceived as Mr. Oscar’s real self was indeed not real? Do you think Celine goes home to her true self after she exits the limo at the end of the film? When the limousines are in dialogue, they say, “We’re becoming inadequate.” What does this say about the larger purpose of human life?

  • Viewer Post – Holy Motors

    After watching Holy Motors, I found myself wondering and thinking many different things. To start, the film felt less like a narrative and more like a sequence of performances all by Monsieur Oscar as he transformed between being many different things, like a beggar, father, assasin, etc. It made me wonder if there was a real identity underneath, or if identity itself is just a performance.

    I also found it interesting how the film uses mise-en-scene to create identity. I noticed how in each appointment Oscar attends, it is defined by a completely different visual world and the costume, setting, and lighting reshape who he is. For example, in the motion-capture scene, his body is reduced to data points. My interpretation of this is that cinema transforms actors into something that is fake and artificial.

    I think this film also puts an emphasis on spectatorship, similarly to what we saw in previous films this semester. In the opening scene, the man looks out into the audience, reminding us that performance depends on being watched. But throughout the film, there aren’t really any visible cameras. However, Oscar keeps performing anyway, which shows that maybe cameras aren’t really required at all.

    I think overall, the film encourages multiple interpretations and gives us a sense of ambiguity. It can be seen by some a critique of cinema, and left me with the question of: if we are always performing, is there anything beneath that performance, or is the performance just all there is?

  • VIEWER: wtf (What the France) did I just watch….

    Well….yeah. We finally arrive at what makes this class worth 4 credits. Leos Carax Holy Motors (2012) is one of the most abstract films I have ever seen in my life. I truly did not expect to understand as little as I did. At the same time, I feel like I understand it a little bit at a high level at least.

    Clearly, the film is about the concept of putting on a show or performance and wearing different costumes. Oscar does this literally but it serves as a metaphor for us in real life; Oscar hardly has a moment to himself where he is not portraying a character. In the later half of the movie, he even sings a few lines from Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”, a song quite literally about Sinatra quitting showbusiness and living life for himself. The crazy things that Mr. Oscar does (bite the journalist’s fingers off, kill several people, get killed himself) seem to not phase him at all. There is no limit for how far he will go within each character, again mirroring how in real life people will do crazy things to maintain the image they have constructed.

    There is also a clear element about film technology. Oscar reminisces about the old, heavy film cameras and how he could see the camera and knew the audience that was watching his movie. The movie was made in 2012, 5 years after the iPhone released and suddenly everyone had a pocket sized camera. Now, like Oscar says, we have no idea who is filming us, where the cameras are, and where the footage is going or who is watching it. This is especially timely in the modern age of increasing surveillance. We also see the scene at the end where the limos talk to each other and worry about being retired. The limos show us a literal example of technology on the cusp of an update (when was the last time anyone has seen a limo like that?).

    While Oscar does talk about cameras like this and how he keeps acting no matter what, the studio-head type man in the car with him brings up that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A question that kept popping in my mind which seemed super obvious was “Where is the camera?” We know he is acting, yet we fail to see a single camera capturing his performance excluding the motion capture sequence. The only answer I could come to for this was that the camera is there; its quite literally the one the movie was filmed on that we are watching. This answer can connect the beginning theater scene to the rest of the movie too. A character walks out to a full theater but the whole audience is asleep. The character that walks out is literally played by the director Leos Carax. In a very meta way, this could be Leos Carax saying he will make a film that audiences cannot fall asleep in, thus creating Holy Motors, a film that constantly has you on your toes with each assignment almost being its own movie. I wish I had the capacity to form a real question but honestly all I can say is what reading did you have of the movie? Do you agree or disagree with any of the points I brought up? How does he “die” but not really??? Most importantly, does anyone sell whatever Leos Carax was on making this?

  • Reader: “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” connection to Lady Bird

    After reading David Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” a film that I watched somewhat recently that I believe would fit his definition of art Cinema is Greta Gerwig’s 2017 Lady Bird. Bordwell, in his essay, defends the idea that Art cinema is more than a group of films; it is a clear method of creating cinema with a history, ways of being made, and ways of being viewed that are different from mainstream Hollywood films or classical narrative films. David Bordwell explains that one big factor of Art Cinema is realism. Lady Bird is a film with a strong sense of realism. Unlike many Hollywood films that care more about the plot, Lady Bird doesn’t use cause-and-effect logic (classical narrative films do this to create a format where one event quickly follows the next). The film focuses more on characters’ mental problems and hard emotions. The film cares to present the main characters’ psychological complexity over pushing a certain story arc forward. Another major part of art cinema that is presented in Lady Bird is ambiguity and open-endedness. Even though at the end we finally see the main character move to New York as she hoped, we don’t truly know if she is happy or if the story really ends. Unlike many mainstream coming-of-age Hollywood movies, Lady Bird doesn’t have an apparent happy ending, but what this does for the viewer is make the film feel more realistic to real life. The film leaves you with questions about how the main character feels. Another major part of Art cinema that I learned from David Bordwell is authorship, which is the concept that the director is the main power and direction of creativity in the film. Although I am not very well-versed in Greta Gerwig’s work or Lady Bird, I can assume Gerwig used her personal life and film techniques to make the film a special viewing experience.

  • Reader: Experimental and Art Film

    After reading the weekly readings, I immediately thought of Mulholland Drive (2001), a film I had seen a few years ago, directed by David Lynch. The reason I thought of this movie is because it possesses many elements that makes it a clear example of what Bordwell calls “art cinema.”

    Art cinema is very against classical Hollywood narrative techniques that we’ve spent a lot of time on in class like continuity editing, and instead uses two main principles; realism and authorial expressivity (Bordwell, page 717). Bordwell says realism in art cinema means psychologically complex characters who lack clear goals and drift passively through situations, more similar to how people are in real life. In Mulholland Drive, Betty and Rita act exactly like this. Rita wanders through the film with no memory of who she is, and Betty’s goals slowly dissolve the deeper the story goes. By the second half the viewer is wondering what was ever real to begin with, and what are the characters goals and motives. This is exactly what Bordwell means when he says art cinema characters make vague and sometimes nonexistent choices.

    Bordwell also says that art cinema foregrounds the director as an organizing force. David Lynch’s directing in this film is a perfect example of this, as he purposefully leaves stylistic signatures everywhere, for example the use of unsettling ambient sound and the slow dread. A viewer knows immediately they are watching a Lynch film, and that authorial presence replaces the classical narrative logic that gets abandoned. These two elements are tied together through what Bordwell calls it ambiguity. Mulholland Drive never tells you what is real and what is fantasy. And unlike a lot of films we’ve seen that use continuity editing, the ending resolves nothing, it only deepens the mystery. Bordwell says the art cinema viewer swings between looking for a realistic explanation and an authorial one, and this film keeps you doing both simultaneously without ever letting you land on either. 

    After thinking about this film in relation to the readings, I’m left wondering at what point a film becomes too ambiguous even for art cinema, and whether Mulholland Drive crosses that line or if it embodies it perfectly.

  • Reader: Visible Machines, Hidden Truths

    Classical Hollywood films try to let audiences forget they are watching a movie. However, experimental films or the art cinema use certain techniques to create opposite effects and entirely different audience experiences. Their choices throughout the films remind audiences of the complexity of life.

    In Bordwell’s article, he explained how the art cinema mode, unlike Hollywood where every action has a clear reason, often loosens causality. The linkages between events became loosened. For example, a character is lost but he is never found even towards the end of the film. The lack of clear cause-and-effect explanations create ambiguity, which forces or encourages the audience to interpret the film instead of just consuming it. 

    In the interview with Carax, he mentioned the gradual disappearance of “large” machines like huge cameras and steamed engines from the early cinema. Nowadays, everything becomes virtual and “small”. In the film, there are stretch limousines which serve as the machine of Monsieur Oscar. It is an old, visible vessel that carries Oscar though the digital, invisible world.

    The articles remind me of Julie Dash’s Illusions, where Esther’s physical voice is the actual soul of the Hollywood image. It is a direct parallel with Monsieur Oscsar, whose physical body provides the soul for a virtual monster. Esther’s recording booth acts as the “machine” like Oscar’s limousine.

    Ultimately, both of the films suggest the machines of cinema are where the human soul is hidden. By loosening causality and accepting ambiguity, directors like Carax and Dash transform cinema into a visible machine that reclaims human presence from invisibility of a virtual world.

  • Reader : Who Is Telling the Story? Narrative ambiguity in Fight Club

    David Bordwell’s discussion of realism, plot manipulation and ambiguity in art cinema made me think of Fight Club. Bordwell notes that one of the central puzzles in art cinema is determining who is telling the story. This idea strongly applies to the way Fight Club unfolds, as the film creates ambiguity through the unreliable perspective and subjective narration of the unnamed narrator, played by  Edward Norton. The audience is guided entirely by his viewpoint, which ultimately proves to be unstable, forcing viewers to question the reality of what they are seeing. 

    Bordell also explains that art cinema realism can “encompass a spectrum of possibilities” (719). In Fight Club, this is evident in how narration blends external reality with the narrator’s internal mental state. The film does not clearly distinguish between what is objectively real and what is psychologically constructed, which aligns with Bordwell’s idea that art cinema often prioritizes psychological realism over strict narrative clarity.

    Additionally, Bordwell argues that flashforwards emphasize authorial presence by drawing attention to narration itself: “we must notice how the narrator teases us with knowledge that no character can have” (721). While classical narrative cinema typically presents events in a clear chronological order, art cinema often disrupts the structure to foreground storytelling as a constructed process. Fight Club reflects this approach by manipulating its plot in ways that challenge conventional storytelling.

    One clear example is the opening scene, which functions as a flashforward. The film begins with the narrator held at gunpoint.. This scene establishes the stakes while also creating confusion, prompting the audience to question how the story arrives at this point. The flashforward is a way to generate curiosity and draw attention to the narration itself.

    In the Interview with Leos Carax – director of Holy Motors- it seems Carax would agree with the usefulness of flashforwards as he tells the interviewer that he decided to “begin the film with this sleeper who wakes up in the middle of the night and finds himself in his pajamas in a large cinema filled with ghosts.” Like Fight Club, this opening does not follow a conventional narrative structure but instead foregrounds the artificiality of storytelling. By starting at a disorienting point, both films shape how the audience interprets the narrative that follows.

  • Reader: Ambiguity in Picnic At Hanging Rock

    Picnic at Hanging Rock at first relies on the ignorance of the audience. You mustn’t know of the film’s literary source material. Even if you do, the presentation is such that your knowledge is made suspect. The first image on screen is a block of expository text that describes the entirety of the film’s central event. It is a stark statement. Ominous in presentation. People have vanished at this specific time and place! Ellipsis…. A familiar gesture in likeminded prologues projecting a sense of reality. As such, it introduces right away a prevalent theme in the film, this conflict between realism and authorial expressivity. Hanging Rock is a real place in Victoria, Australia. And it is plausible schoolgirls would disappear from there, having ventured outside the comfort and presumed safety of their educational institution; or perhaps more appropriately, their enclave of European civility, suspended in the surrounding bush. But this did not happen. The events are fictional.

    Stylistically, the film is dream-like throughout, setting the narrative tone before any actual narrative is performed. Director Peter Weir placed various bridal veil fabrics over the camera lens to create the effect. The result is a soft image, strategically used at various points in the film. Most notably, in the scenes leading up to the disappearance. We can then take the veil itself as both functional and symbolic in service of authorial commentary — the space between knowing and unknowing is one that can trap without relent, without resolution. We, the audience, are left to imagine, but even within the bounds of realism our imaginations are insufficient for satisfactorily explaining the core trauma of the film (i.e., the girls’ disappearance).

    The tone of the film reflects an authorial motivation, both implicit and explicit. As an adaptation, the filmmakers have the motivation to adapt Joan Lindsay’s novel authentically. In the nature of classical norms, it is sensible to portray Hanging Rock as a mysterious location. However, as told by Weir, the crew and cast felt uneasy on location at the real Hanging Rock. Knowing this and seeing the film, the author is made visible. The spirit of the location has influenced how the film is shot, how the actors behave. Even a simple handheld shot can feel as if it is lingering just a bit too long, shaking a bit too much, making us stare up at the looming rock just as the cinematographer presumably is through the lens. Truly unsettling.

    Further still, once on the rock, the film makes it difficult to discern where exactly the girls are on said rock. In a montage seemingly out-of-time, shots of the girls swaying and twirling dissolve into stills of the rock in various locations — then those same shots of the girls dissolve into each other until the location itself no longer feels part of reality. In this sense, the girls have exited the plane of realism, and so has the film. When the tension and fear has boiled to a point, the disappearance is unexpectedly not an act of violence. Dangerous, yes. But a danger willfully entered. The girls go on their own. No explanation. Thereafter in the narrative, the remaining characters are concerned with the why and how of the disappearance; however, if read as a piece of art cinema, the audience should be questioning what the disappearance means in context of the film’s message.

    With all that in mind, if I were to directly apply the method of analysis Bordwell details in his essay “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” to an infamously ambiguous film, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, I would conclude that the aim of such a film is to convey, as Bordwell says, that life is just “leaving loose ends” (Bordwell 721). The girls are gone. Possible in life. That’s not the point, though. A common interpretation is that the rock represents the unknowable quality of the outback, which characterizes the vast majority of land in Australia. Thus, with Australia merely being a collection of British colonies in 1900, these English girls disappearing quite literally into the unknown land could be the film’s way of emphasizing tension with the land or some sort of imposition on it.

    Regardless of interpretation, as historically being part of Australia’s New Wave movement, Picnic at Hanging Rock is considered art cinema. Upon inspection, I can confirm it is so. The film uses both narrative and causative ambiguity to make the audience seek authorial motivation, just as Bordwell characterizes art cinema as doing.

    Source: Bordwell, David. “The Art of Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”

  • “Holy Motors” and Experimental Cinematography

    Holy Motors (2012, dir. Leos Carax) deals with a man dressing up in different costumes and running to different places in Paris across something that remains the same: the day. However, the audience never sees a camera follow him in the frantic rush as Carax notes in an interview at the New York Film Festival conference. Interviewer Amy Taubin asks Carax about the evolution of the camera, as well as the role it plays in the film (even though we never see it). Carax responds that Holy Motors‘ shots almost feel like it is “god watching” the protagonist. As David Bordwell writes in his essay, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” cinema is bound by the two principles of “realism and authorial expressivity.” In experimental films, a director’s or creative team’s expressivity may be valued over realism. Throughout this example, we specifically see this reading’s instance of expressivity through the shots in Holy Motors. Carax also notes that “we didn’t shoot with a camera. We shot with a computer [the Red Epic].” Overall, this interview shows how films might opt to portray art cinema’s concepts of realism and creative expression.

    Watch here if video player above does not work.

  • READER: Art Cinema is NOT Classical Cinema

    Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) co-directed by Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan is a good example of a mainstream movie that is not considered art cinema, but it does use some of its techniques.

    Art cinema is explicitly against classical Hollywood narrative techniques like continuity editing or three-point lighting and cause-effect linkage (Bordwell, 717). It instead utilizes two principles: realism and authorial expressivity.

    Bordwell says that realism can be characterized by its use of, “‘realistic’ – that is, psychologically complex – characters.” In Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) the main characters are complex and have traits that seem to contradict each other in a very human way. Evelyn is both loving but critical and dismissive, while Joy her daughter is vulnerable and sensitive but also destructive. Joy’s goals and desires aren’t necessarily clearly defined, even as she invites Evelyn to join her in her destruction you’re left wondering what her true goal is: Does she want total destruction or does she just desire to be understood? This fits Bordwell’s idea that art cinema characters often lack a single goal and make sometimes vague choices.

    Bordwell also characterizes a film as art cinema through its use of authorial commentary. It can be understood as the way art cinema uses authorship to unify a film and pushes a competent viewer to expect stylistic signatures in the narration. The directors of this film are known for their blending of humor and emotion in their stories. Seemingly random elements like a universe where everyone has hotdogs for fingers becomes an emotionally meaningful symbol of love even through absurdity. Things like this in a film can become an “authorial signature” as Bordwell says.

    Finally, this film uses something that Bordwell says merges the two elements of art cinema: ambiguity. The ending is somewhat philosophically open-ended, which Bordwell says is a common way of ending an art cinema film. By the end, some of the main questions the plot poses are answered, but it also leaves you with more questions that will cause you to think about what truly matters when there are infinite realities.

    Art cinema in its simplest form embraces the uncertainty and interpretation that can sometimes be lost in mainstream films. It gives the filmmaker artistic freedom as an author and encourages the viewer to think critically about a film.

    I’m now left to question how many elements of art cinema must be present in a film for it to be considered as an art cinema film beyond the lack of classical narrative techniques?

    Sources: Bordwell, David. “The Art of Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”