Ohad Landesman, Holy Motors In: Metacinema. Edited by: David LaRocca, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0009 8 Holy Motors Metameditation on Digital Cinema’s Present and Future Ohad Landesman Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) is a flm that opens before flm, with the pho- tographic motion experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey. Tose early moments of movement captured on screen are among the frst proto-cinematic human performances, and they appear at the beginning of a flm that is entirely shot on digital. Such a clear duality marks an essential trait in Holy Motors right from the outset: here is a flm that is celebrating the past in order to envision what is going to happen in the future. As the medium is fnalizing its transi- tion into the digital age, Carax takes a hard look at the legacy of 120 years of flm history and rethinks the basic constituents of the cinematic experience. With clearly nostalgic yearning for the early days of celluloid cinema, on the one hand, and concomitantly inciteful optimism about digital possibilities, on the other, Holy Motors becomes a metacinematic work about both the death of cinema and its concurrent rebirth. Te flm represents and complicates, as I will argue in this chapter, cultural and critical anxieties about the im- pact of new technologies on cinema’s development in the twenty-frst cen- tury, whether such impact entails the omnipresence of small digital cameras without an audience; new media capacities for formulating a fragmented and non-narrative story; the virtual, non-indexical presence of the rapidly changing shape of digital performance; or simply the disappearance of an immersive and contemplative flmgoing experience in a theatrical setting. Holy Motors also encapsulates a personal dimension, the creative anxiety of a flmmaker making his frst flm in thirteen years, not without elegiac feelings about how in that period of time the medium has irrevocably changed. Holy Motors, in my opinion, looks at the transition to digital from a criti- cally balanced position that puts the old and the new together—it treats digital cinema not as a historical point of rupture and crisis, but as a necessary and evolutionary stage that is merely extending the past indefnitely into the fu- ture rather than altering the present completely. It celebrates the past of cel- luloid technology and mourns the disappearance of “old” cinema in order to OUP UNCORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOF – REVISES, Fri May 21 2021, NEWGEN LaRocca051220_EAP_ATUS.indd 173 LaRocca051220_EAP_ATUS.indd 173 21-May-21 11:28:02 21-May-21 11:28:02