If you’re trying to tell a panoramic story, a big story about Hollywood and its origins, you kind of have to include both high and low, beautiful and ugly. Because I think [what] makes Hollywood so fascinating is that the two coexist, sometimes even in the same frame. You know, to only condemn Hollywood, or only celebrate it, I think, is to miss a big part of the picture.

Damien Chazelle, Interview by Harper R. Oreck and Jaden S. Thompson, “The Harvard Crimson”, 31 January 2023

It is almost impossible to talk about Babylon without talking about its finale. In 1952, after having left Hollywood years before, Manny visits a cinema to see Singin’ in the Rain. Times have changed, old friends and colleagues have died tragically, and the high life is nothing but a distant memory. However, the story of cinema does not end. All of a sudden, as the hero sits in the theatre, Damien Chazelle launches us into a dazzling montage of images extracted from the entire history of cinema (even films yet to be made): from the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge to Avatar, from avant-garde works of early cinema to The Matrix. Everything is transformed, nothing is destroyed. But whose dream is this? Manny’s premonition or a lucid coma for the 21st-century spectators?
Over the preceding three hours, the American director has constructed a paradoxical project about “larger-thanlife” movies – those of 1920s Hollywood – depicting (while imitating) how that sort of cinema was unable to survive its colossal nature. A high-risk mammoth production about the collapse of that self-same model: it takes some courage.
And today? How was it possible to shoot Babylon in this era of online streaming services and digital blockbusters? For Chazelle, it was about not being afraid of anything: his film recounts (at breakneck speed) stardom, production, innovation, drug abuse, alcoholism, crime, debt, racism, jazz, sex, patriarchy, capitalism, Marxism, gender, genres, silent and sound, black-and-white and colour, all in one vessel. As if that weren’t enough, it is also the heartbreaking story of unrequited love. The “whitewashed” Mexican cannot hope to conquer the heart of the gorgeous but uncontrollable Nellie. Because she is too beautiful for him, or perhaps because of his origins. A love destined to be denied.
Babylon lives on some heath halfway between Josef von Sternberg, That’s Entertainment and Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind. It lays claim to mainstream American experimentalism, the art of images, which today is becoming ever more difficult to see.

Roy Menarini