From the poetics of masks to the beauty of gesture:

an analysis of the film Holy Motors, by Leos Carax

Abstract

It is a questiono f proposing a reflection on the philosophical status of the issues raised by Holy Motors, a 2012 feature film directed by french filmmaker Leos Carax. To do so, we will guide our horizon of analysis from two central operators that emerge from the complex plot of the film: the poetics of masks, on the one hand, and the beauty of gesture, on the other. Such questions would help us to conjecture a vast set of problems that Carax’s film touches on, such as a questioning about the consistency of the notions of “subject” and “identity”, an understanding of the structural variability of masks as a mechanism for the production of meaning, a mediation on the time of repetition as a modality of affirmation in the world and the possibility of extracting a poetics of conduct and an involuntary beauty through the expression of psychologically deconstituted subjects.