| French filmmaker Leos Carax's 2012 digital feature Holy Motors represents a shift in the director's filmmaking identity from one of ego-construction to schizophrenic deconstruction as a result of the cinema's progression into the digital medium of movie-making in the twenty-first century. The significant movements fueling Leos Carax's relationship with the cinema including the Silent Era, The New Wave, Les cinema du look, and the Digital Revolution as well as his major films are explored through Deleuze and Guatarri's notion of schizoanalysis to demonstrate how the director shifts his cinematic style in an attempt to both accommodate new forms and nostalgically lament the abandoned artistry of the filmic past. Once this schizo-identity state is applied to Leos Carax, the thesis then offers a critique of Holy Motors through N. Katherine Hayle's theory of technogenesis and Marshall McLuhan's media studies, demonstrating how the feature's emphasis on human and technological co-evolution as well as the director's obsession with machines and the film apparatus contributes to his evolving and dissolving identity states. |
