Leos Carax Bemoans Digital-Era Image Overload: “If I Were A Dictator, I Would Limit People To Sharing 24 Images A Year” – Qumra
04.03.2024 - 15:15
/ deadline.com
French filmmaker Leos Carax discussed the sacred nature of the image and the challenge of retaining its power on the big screen in the digital age in an on-stage conversation at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event on Monday.
The filmmaker said he had transitioned to shooting in digital in his segment of the 2008 feature Tokyo!, one of his first works after the death of his beloved cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who died age 52 in 2003.
Carax revealed this move had changed his filmmaking process as he took the decision to stopped watching the dailies from then on, which resulted in him ditching his habit of doing multiple retakes.
The director admitted that 15 years on, he is not a huge fan of shooting in digital.
“I don’t come from there. I still feel It’s a bad thing, even for the eyes… it’s become such a problem with digital that we have too many images,” he said. “Some people love it, some people are sick of it, but you could say we’re all sick from it.”
“If I was a dictator, a nice dictator, says a king or queen, or sheikh or an emir, or whatever, I would not allow people to share more than 24 image a year,” he quipped. “Images in religion, in Muslim religion, were sacred. We went from that, to too many images.”
Later in the conversation, Carax commented on the challenge of renewing the moving image to engage new audiences.
“It’s the only art for which a machine had to be invented for it to exist,” he said of cinema “It’s very young, only a century old, but it’s also very old.
“You have to reinvent it every generation… It goes back to what we were saying before about sacred images, you have to reinvent the power of the silent films. The people who watched the first film, this train coming into a train