Côté punk: Marc Caro

Abstract

Coming to comics and cinema culture in 1970s Paris, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet brought their do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic to the screen with L’évasion (Jeunet, 1978), Le manège (Jeunet, 1980) and Le bunker de la dernière rafale (Caro and Jeunet,1981) – awarded shorts that would set the tone for Delicatessen (Caro and Jeunet, 1992) and La cité des enfants perdus (Caro and Jeunet, 1995). Acknowledged outsiders, the duo embraced a certain bricolage of early cinema, an interest in the carnival and apocalyptic science fiction applied to narrative and mise en scène. In this article, I argue for a reading of their cinema through the lens of DIY and punk. This is evident mostly in the works of Caro, who suggests that côté punk takes root in a passion for George Méliès coupled with adventurous explorations in sound and spectacle, a heightened intertextuality and a reclaimed retro-aesthetic, as foregrounded in Caro and Jeunet’s DIY ethic and Le bunker’s long-running double billing at the midnight movies with David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). From this, I study imagery and influence in Caro’s comics, graphic novels, films and music over the years. The duo’s recent exhibits in Paris and Lyon and publications offering retrospectives of their cinema make this scholarly inquiry all the more timely.