Leos Carax (French Film Directors) Garin Dowd

Leos Carax is the first book in any language to study the films of this "enfant terrible" of contemporary French cinema. Paris, pop music, "flânerie" and "amour fou," "mannerist" and "neo-baroque" aesthetics, the Nouvelle Vague and contemporary "naturalist" cinema--these key ingredients of the worlds of Carax"s four films (including Les Amants du Pont Neuf and Pola X) are examined here. The authors draw on a variety of intellectual sources, from Deleuze"s philosophy and Cahiers-based film criticism to the theory of art and literary monographs in order to disentangle the complex web of biographical mythology, formal and intellectual cinematic concerns, flamboyant imagery and intertextual references woven by Carax and his films in the last two decades of the 20th century.