The beauty of the act: Figuring film and the delirious baroque in ‘Holy Motors’

Abstract

leos carax’s metamorphic Holy Motors (2012) has been received as evading conceptual, physical, and cinematic coherence. drawing on gilles deleuze’s concept of the fold and Nicole Brenez’s work on the figural powers of the cinema, this article argues that carax’s film reprises the aesthetics of a delirious baroque. re-evaluating the relevance of the baroque for carax and for cinema, it identifies the delirious baroque as an embodied aesthetics of movement, materiality, and multiplicity as well as vision.