Coppola, A. « Annette » de Carax : une fantomachie biographique (2023) Modern and Contemporary France,
DOI: 10.1080/09639489.2023.2269396
Abstract
Leos Carax’s film ‘Annette’, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, left no one indifferent: something important was being said about cinema and, in particular, about French cinema. The thread running through our analysis of the film is that of the author’s self-psychoanalysis, with Carax himself inviting us to do so. What emerges is a tragic personal account, but also a Caraxian ego of a cursed genius of highly mediatised cinema, which the film attempts to mix with a critique of showbiz in general. This criticism is light, but it is illuminated by the notions of Michel Foucault’s regime of veridiction and Jay Martin’s scopic regime. An organisation of seeing-seen and showing-shown haunts both so-called postmodern society and cinema; that of Carax in particular, who tries to announce-denounce it like Jean-Luc Godard by playing with meta-diegetics. This hantology or fantomachy in the manner of Derrida does not, however, achieve a critique of the spectacle that is not a spectacle of critique, as the conditions in which the film was made and broadcast show. © 2023 Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France.
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