AN EXTREME AUTEUR
How do the films of Gaspar Noé challenge the threshold of audience endurance while building upon what has been called ‘The New Extreme’ of European cinema?
This is my senior thesis in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. Out of all the topics I could’ve chosen to research, I knew I wanted to significantly examine the work of Gaspar Noé, who I consider one of the great visionaries of modern cinema, while acknowledging that his films are not for the faint-hearted. Although his approach is controversial, I firmly believe every film student, critic, and scholar owes it to themselves to better examine his experimental methods and understand the purpose of his work. Ever since I discovered Noé’s films, I have been endlessly fascinated and, in some ways, even frustrated by his bold and confrontational style. Having gone through dark times in my personal life, I find a great deal of meaning in his examinations of violence, brutality, toxicity, and social structures gone awry.
I want to thank my professor, the great Annette Insdorf, for gifting me the opportunity to research and write about Noé’s work for my thesis. A fun fact about her is that she attended the infamous Cannes premiere of Noé’s film “Irreversible” in 2002 and was among the walkout crowd. By her admission, as she was leaving, she told her husband, “Life is too short.” Considering the subjects I discussed in my thesis were not within her comfort zone, it means the world to me that she remained open-minded and did not allow that to cloud her judgment of my work. More than the grade I received for the assignment, the accomplishment I feel most proud of is that Professor Insdorf learned much about Noé she never knew and was willing to watch his most recent film, “Vortex” (2021).
I must also thank all my friends in my Senior Seminar class for their amazing feedback after my presentation — a discussion that took up nearly two hours of class time. On a personal note to Carrie, Grace, Isabella, Katie, Linnea, R.J., Savanna, Selina, Valerie, Victor, and Vivienne— I couldn’t have written this as well as I did without your valuable feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing all of your thesis subjects, and I hope to get the opportunity to read them soon.
With all the thanks and gratitude out of the way, please enjoy this detailed look at the “Enfant Terrible” of French cinema. You are now about to enter the world of Gaspar Noé.
Since his career began in 1991 with the founding of his production company, Les Cinémas de la Zone,[1] and debut short film Carne (1991), the Argentinian-born French director Gaspar Noé emerged as the “enfant terrible”[2] in a movement initially coined as the “New French Extremity.” (From this point forward, it will be called “The New Extreme” since it pertains not only to France.) Even if he made only seven feature films, Noé’s unique and experimental filmmaking strategies forge a readily apparent signature that separates him from his contemporaries. His early work with Carne and I Stand Alone (1998) went together with the New Extreme’s graphic depictions of violence, sex, and brutality that symbolize transgressions in French history and modern society. However, as Noé’s career progressed with works like Irreversible (2002), Enter the Void (2009), and Climax (2018), he began to experiment with film form, expanding the possibilities of the movement. Noé’s most essential strategies are experiments with drug-influenced, dreamlike cinematography and narrative form. While encompassing the characteristics of the New Extreme, these strategies heighten thematic elements and create potential for new ways of examining extremity. This thesis will examine these three films with the prevailing theories of the New Extreme: extremity as a symbol of national identity (Alexandra West), Cinéma du Corps (Cinema of the Body) that gives a nihilistic view of what it means to be human where impulse overrules psychology (Tim Palmer), and the everyday where violence either disrupts or connects with daily routines (Alison Taylor). In analyzing these films, this thesis will explore what the New Extreme is and how Noé became a prominent figure by epitomizing its methods and then subverting them to create his unique auteurism.
To understand Noé’s perspective, one need look no further than his films for reference. At the beginning of Climax, as characters are introduced through interviews on a TV, stacks of books and films surround the TV. The films include many that directly influence Noé and the New Extreme, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981), and personal influences like Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). The books contain work by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who Noé studied intensively at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University as a philosophy student.
Noé’s worldview comes from his upbringing in an artistically rich and politically active family. His father, Luis Felipe Noé, was instrumental in the Nueva Figuración and Otra Figuración art movements.[3] His mother, Nora Ofelia Murphy, was a social worker. His early years were in New York City before they moved back to Argentina in 1966 to find it had become an authoritarian state. Friends of the Noé’s were locked in torture camps because of their left-leaning politics. Tim Palmer, a film historian at the University of North Carolina and author of Irreversible (a film analysis), documents that after military forces raided their house, the Noé’s escaped Argentina’s military junta regime in 1976 and relocated to Paris, France (55–6).[4]
After these experiences, Noé viewed violence in cinema as a form of expression that symbolizes power and hierarchy (Firdaus 53–4).[5] He quickly shifted toward film, using his father’s friendship with director Fernando E. Solanas to work as an assistant director on Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1985), and Sur (1988). Noé’s film career began during the rise of right-wing politics under Jacques Chirac, where the central controversies of the French government were (and still are) police brutality and the killing of Muslims and other minority communities, leading to riots in Paris and its suburbs throughout the 1990s. According to Alexandra West, author of Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity, these racist ideologies remained burrowed within French society following the Vichy Government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II, and violent government practices bred out of state-endorsed torture during the Algerian War. (23–31)[6]
To confront these transgressions, Noé cast veteran actor Philippe Nahon as The Butcher in his debut short Carne and its feature-length sequel I Stand Alone. Noé’s nihilistic style is on full display in this tale of a man violently rejecting society’s norms to the point of bigotry, becoming what he despises. At the end of I Stand Alone, it is insinuated that he sleeps with his daughter — which brings him happiness regardless of society’s standards. At the premiere of I Stand Alone at the Edinburgh Festival, Noé said: “A lot of people ask me if this is a racist movie, and I say, yes, it’s an anti-French movie” (West 47). With these two films, Noé laid the groundwork for the New Extreme alongside contemporaries like Michael Haneke[7] (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video), who illustrated violence amidst contemporary alienation, and Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl), Claire Denis (Trouble Every Day), and Leos Carax (Pola X), who examined correlations between sexuality and destruction through the representation of the body. Although Noé had a brash voice in these films, he would find his distinct signature in his upcoming work.
IRREVERSIBLE (2002)
“Real victims of assault feel and experience every minute with no escape except that which we can find for ourselves. It is dehumanizing. It is upsetting, and it can feel like an eternity. We watch the entirety of Alex’s attack in solidarity with her. If she can survive experiencing it, surely we can survive watching it.” — Jenn Adams, DreadCentral.com (2023)
Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible pushes the envelope by constructing 12 sequence shots that detail the events of a horrific night in Paris, France.[8] A young woman named Alex (Monica Bellucci) gets raped and beaten before her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and ex-boyfriend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) set out to kill the rapist. Although shot chronologically, the film was edited in reverse chronology.[9] As such, it begins with the brutal murder of the wrong man and reverts to the causes that brought about these actions. By Noé’s definition, Irreversible is about intimacy.[10] More important than what causes Marcus’s desire for revenge is the vulnerability he and Pierre create within Alex, which leads to her horrific suffering for nine-and-a-half minutes. For many, however, the visceral horror of this rape story was too much and led to many debates about its director, content, and whether it pushed the envelope too far.[11] [12]
Canadian film critic James Quandt famously berated the film and its movement in an article for Artforum, where he coined the term “New French Extremity.”[13] In contrast, Noé claimed his film to be feminist because of its critical view of toxic masculinity.[14] [15]Although some American critics like Roger Ebert and Lisa Nesselson identified these anti-rape and anti-violence messages at the time, most did not.
Quandt’s piece began widespread discussions of the New Extreme, but time has destroyed its legitimacy. Many critics and authors now dismiss the article as hyperbolic and unfair. Modern discussion of Irreversible has become more positive following MeToo.[16] Although Irreversible was not the first extremity film to premiere at Cannes, Noé’s film sent shock waves that brought international attention to a brutally confrontational style of filmmaking. Films like Haneke’s Caché (2005), Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) would premiere at Cannes in the following years. Because of Irreversible’s infamy and explicit violence, it is Noé’s most discussed film within The New Extreme.
Ironically, this film started Noé’s stylistic experimentation with cinematography and narrative that subverts many of the movement’s methods. More than violence as a symbol of power in Salò or body horror in Possession and David Cronenberg films, his most significant cinematic influence was the dreamlike style of Stanley Kubrick.[17] Beginning with this film, Noé started what he describes as a brother-like bond with cinematographer Benoît Debie.[18] Together, they create a visual scheme to express the characters’ minds, with Noé operating the camera and Debie designing meticulous lighting and colors. This approach becomes apparent at the beginning of the film, which opens with a prologue unassociated with the central narrative. Nahon appears as The Butcher one last time and confesses his shame in having sex with his daughter. The camera begins outside his apartment, warping and twisting sideways and upside-down before gliding into his room, where he and a man appear the same way. Debie depicts the Parisian buildings and room interiors with an intense yellow light. During this confession, the film introduces a central theme as he says, “Time destroys all things,” rhyming a statement in I Stand Alone, “No act is reversible.” The camera then tilts downward, taking an overhead view of Marcus getting stretchered out of a nightclub with a broken arm and the police arresting Pierre.
This set-up centers around time and dreams theorized by J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment in Time (1927) — which Alex references in the film.[19] Dunne theorizes two models of time: Time 1, where we inhabit a concurrent state every day, and Time 2, in which all events coalesce in a perpetual flux that the mind might access through dreams, trances, and hypnotic episodes (Palmer 73). Most films of the movement ground themselves in everyday images before disrupting them with acts of violence. Alison Taylor, a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Society and Design at Bond University, argues that everyday patterns create social order and minimize disruption and uncertainty (3). The distinction she argues with Irreversible is that it does not look at violence through the lens of normalcy but instead looks at the everyday through the lens of violence. “The film itself operates on a kind of continuum — at one end, a chaotic frenzy of violence bereft of a framework to render it legible, at the other, a serene and transcendent vision of the everyday that is inflected with the violence that has proceeded it” (121). Actions in Irreversible present violence in its most confrontational form, but the narrative seems to transcend the physical world and into oneiric territory.
The film’s visual and sonic scopes amplify a nightmarish tone in the following scenes, where Marcus and Pierre search for the rapist, Le Tenia (Jo Prestia). Marcus finds who he thinks is Le Tenia, and a fight ensues. Pierre saves him by pulverizing the man’s head with a fire extinguisher as the real Le Tenia watches. Inside the nightclub, the camera continues with chaotic movements as it storms through dark hallways, lit only by flickering red and orange, symbolizing rage and vengeance. The sound design creates disorientation with a droning bass rumble recorded at 27 Hz (West 51).[20] Noé shoots the following scenes (chronologically, the scenes before) with a shaky handheld camera as they roam the streets.
Marcus berates a cab driver, interrogates one of Le Tenia’s prostitutes, and discovers Alex bloody and beaten. The twisting and unsteady camera movements reflect Marcus’s animalistic rage under the influence of drugs, where rationality disappears. Palmer says Marcus epitomizes cinéma du corps, where a protagonist is stripped of logic, flares with viscera, and acts violently (33).[21] Throughout these scenes, Debie still tints Paris with yellow, which seems to represent caution. The film may center around these specific people, but Paris is shown as a city filled with hatred and contempt. Much discussion of the film emphasizes a young adult society taking matters into their own hands. West says it presents a view of Paris that defies the utopian idea promoted by the government and tries to wash away its problematic history.[22] Noé perhaps draws on his and his family’s experience of oppression by their government and condenses it into an emotionally charged domestic story. Like how government oppression is a vulgar act of power against people, rape is the ultimate act of violence against men and women.[23]
The scene that best demonstrates this concept is the controversial nine-and-a-half-minute scene where Le Tenia anally rapes Alex. It is the nucleus that connects everything together narratively and thematically. This scene illustrates Palmer’s theory that sexual behavior is destructive (Palmer 42). The camera slows down and halts, signaling a shift in perspective from Marcus to Alex. She starts at street level and enters a nightmarishly red underpass tunnel where Le Tenia corners her. The camera moves around them, to the opposite side, and becomes stationed with her eye level as she is forced to the ground, keeping the other end of the tunnel in clear view. Although Noé outlined the scene, he gave Bellucci and Prestia the freedom to keep the act going for a considerable length.[24] At one point during the rape, a stranger walks into the background, stops, and walks away. Through the positioning of the camera in the tunnel, the film creates a mirror effect between the audience and this stranger. Noé is cryptic in explaining his intentions, but he likely knew this was the point when most people would walk out, thus presenting a challenge to the viewer. Will we disregard the violence or face it head-on?
After the shock of this scene, Alex’s physical and emotional pain comes into full view. Before her horrific rape, she was at a party with Marcus and Pierre, where she grew tired of Marcus’s unruly behavior as he was abusing substances and flirting with other women. Before that, she was uncomfortable with a conversation where Marcus and Pierre compared their sex lives with her. At the start of the day, she wakes up with Marcus and tells him of a dream where she is in a red tunnel before he leaves. She tests positive for pregnancy and goes outside to read An Experiment in Time. The camera slows down to an observational role while the colors tone down to a naturalistic look — ending in the park with green grass and a blue sky. According to Taylor and West’s theories, the reverse narrative codes these everyday images as tragedies (West 51). Unlike another rape scene in Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001) that shows loss amidst banal reality, Irreversible shows that every day is already devastated (Taylor 123). The nuances in everyday routines that usually go unnoticed become the central focus because the viewer knows their inescapable fate.
Noé subverts Palmer’s theory: acts of violence and discrimination do not come solely from impulsiveness. Marcus and Pierre start as humans instead of animals. Their carelessness makes Alex vulnerable, leading to her tragic assault. Furthermore, Marcus’s words and actions rhyme with the rapist, as when he tells her, “I want to fuck your ass,” recalling the anal rape, or later when he holds a knife to the prostitute.[25] The connection Noé seems to draw is that varying degrees of toxicity lie dormant in people. Irreversible does not merely confront transgressions but examines the causes. It is not a question of whether the film pushed the envelope too far; rather, what leads people to commit acts that can never be undone?
ENTER THE VOID (2009)
“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” — Jean-Luc Godard.
While Irreversible experimented with how filmmaking can emulate a drug experience, combining it with the extreme emotional states of the characters, Noé’s next film, Enter the Void, fully embraces the psychedelic experience. It is shot entirely from the point of view of its central character, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a drug dealer living in Tokyo, Japan, with his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who works as a stripper. He smokes DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) and agrees to meet his friend Victor (Olly Alexander) at The Void bar, only to find it is a trap. Oscar is chased into a bathroom stall, where the police shoot him dead. Either through a powerful drug trip or life after death, his soul (via the subjective camera) leaves his body. Oscar now hovers above the world, looking down at the aftermath of his death as his sister and friends mourn him. For the rest of the film, he glides through memories of his and his sister’s childhood trauma: their parent's death, a blood oath they made to stay together, troubles that arose in Tokyo, and, ultimately, reincarnation.
Noé conceived the idea for Enter the Void during his adolescence when he became fascinated with existentialism. During his college years, he was inspired by the subjective POV style while tripping on mushrooms and watching Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947) — a film shot entirely in first-person perspective.[26] Unlike most screenplays Noé wrote, Enter the Void was a fully completed script that he developed over fifteen years.[27] However, he gave actors creative freedom to improvise dialogue during production. Although the film centers around an out-of-body experience, Noé says he has never experienced one despite his best efforts.[28] Instead, he used his drug experiences to recreate a mental journey during powerful hallucinations. Combined with cinematic influences like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983),[29] Noé constructed his film with cerebral and oneiric elements that create a fever dream of phantasmagoria that he describes as his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Noé is not secretive about how much Kubrick’s film inspired him. A 2001 poster appears in Alex’s apartment at the end of Irreversible, and characters endlessly discuss it in Love (2015). These references connect his films: the opening credits to Enter the Void use the same pulsating electronic score found at the end of Irreversible.[30] There, the screen spirals out of control as intense luminosity shows the camera zooming into the universe. By connecting these sounds and images, Noé seems to suggest that the cerebral narrative under the influence of psychedelics connects to cosmic energy beyond the confines of the human body because of the drug’s spiritual qualities.
Unlike most films of the New Extreme, Enter the Void is set in Tokyo. Noé and Debie — with production designers Jean-Andre Carriere and Kikuo Ohta and visual effects art director Pierre Buffin — present the city with ethereal lights and euphoric colors that create a hallucinatory experience.[31] Although many interpret the film as a spiritual journey, Noé has insisted to them that the film is a drug trip. However, he acknowledges that during development he intensively read about reincarnation and the theory of DMT levels in the human brain causing visions when people die.[32] [33]
Enter the Void conducts a different experiment from The New Extreme. From the opening sequence, Noé places the viewer inside Oscar’s perspective as he talks with his sister about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then she heads out to her job, and he smokes DMT. The viewer is aligned with Oscar, watching drug-induced colors, walking with his friend Alex (Cyril Roy) to a bar, and getting shot fatally by police. Oscar’s soul leaves his body; he hovers above into a light that overtakes the screen, flickering and blinding the viewer. Many interpret this moment as “The Ego Death,” in which all sense of self gets relinquished. According to Jin Y. Park, professor of Buddhist and intercultural philosophy at American University, this experience is the acceptance of death:
“Enlightenment occurs when the usually automatized reflexivity of consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling into the void and being wiped out of existence […] [W]hen consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become nothing, and discover that I am everything.” (78–9)
Whether literal or figurative, Oscar’s death signifies nothing. His soul then glides from room to room, across the city, and follows Linda — thus keeping his promise never to leave her. Whereas Oscar is merely a soul, Linda’s body is on full display as she dances and then has sex with her boss, Mario (Masato Tanno). When he is on top of her, the camera glides in and takes his POV, putting Oscar and the viewer in the position of simulating sex with Linda. There is an incestuous connotation between them as his soul travels through memories: these include a return to infancy when the parents’ death in a car wreck left Oscar and Linda orphans, placed in different foster homes, and Oscar resorting to drug dealing to bring her to Japan and reconnect.
A focus on the taboo aspect is common in Noé’s filmography, from The Butcher’s actions in I Stand Alone to the brother-sister dynamic in Climax (2018). While some interpret the incest literally, others argue it to be a dream aspect.[34] Psychologists have suggested that dreams about having sex are not a sign of erotic attraction but rather an envious desire to connect more with a person.[35] In Oscar’s case, having been separated from Linda at an early age and losing his parents, he perhaps sees in her a deep connection with his roots and maybe even as a mother figure. The film has a connective image to suggest this idea when Oscar begins an affair with Victor’s mother. She makes a deal to help fund a plane ticket for Linda if he agrees to have sex. During their erotic encounter, she licks Oscar’s ear, which is juxtaposed with childhood memories of him sucking his mother’s breast and watching Linda do the same. When Linda arrives in Tokyo, and they spend time together, she licks his ear, further connecting her to the maternal image. Another idea with the incest depiction connects to the film’s frequent emphasis on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book describes many Buddhist concepts about the state between life and death, known as a bardo.[36] The bardo of rebirth connects with yab-yum symbolism, where men and women passionately intertwine, representing a union of wisdom and compassion. Oscar penetrating his sister’s body and becoming one with her can be seen as a connection to this concept.
The film expresses the balance between life and death, with the body as a vehicle for procreation. This presentation is different from the New Extreme because it does not render the body as nihilistic. Enter the Void combines the body with mind and spirit to illustrate physical, emotional, and spiritual intimacy. These concepts come together narratively in the film’s climax when Linda gets together with Alex in the Love Hotel (which is referenced in Noé’s following film, Love). As they and others throughout the hotel have sex, ethereal lights glow from their penises and vaginas. The camera hovers over this as the lights and colors flicker out of control until it glides into Linda. The film cuts to inside her vagina as the penis penetrates, ejaculating sperm that overtakes the screen, rhyming the light transitions throughout the film. Rather than render the body a vehicle of self-destruction, Noé’s film illustrates the body as a means of creating life. His presentation may be confrontational but emerges through the darkness when Oscar is reborn as a baby.
While Enter the Void does not exemplify The New Extreme’s methods, it demonstrates Noé’s strategies in experimentation with film form. He shifted the direction of the movement inwards, toward the mind and soul. Other approaches of the New Extreme would follow, such as Bertrand Bonello’s oneiric structure in House of Tolerance (2011) and Julia Ducournau’s metaphorical storytelling in Titane (2021). With this film, Noé showed that extremity was not limited to the everyday, nihilism, or politics. Enter the Void explores how procreation, death, and the afterlife exist in a cyclical balance that creates life.
CLIMAX (2018)
“Both trees and people grow and stand upright, embodying the vertical dimension, so there is a clear spatial match. Otherwise, this is a confrontation, or contest, of ideas and conceptual opposition. The solo dancer represents a tree growing towards God, but as a ‘gnarled’ and distorted body, his naked back turned to us, not an image from the conventional world of beauty of the song.” — Stephanie Jordan, Music-Dance (83–4.)
With Climax, Noé took his films’ chaotic, in-the-moment nature to its apex by putting all the creative direction in the actors’ hands. With only a one-page outline and a five-page treatment of the concept, he left the cast to improvise the rest.[37] He based the film on actual events in France in the Winter of 1996 and his experience with drugs while in the infamous Berlin nightclub Berghain.[38] A proudly French dance troupe celebrates an upcoming performance by renting out a school, rehearsing, and partying the night away. Unbeknownst to them, someone spiked their sangria with LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide). Who did this and why is not a concern; the film monitors and observes the behavior of the dancers.
David (Romain Guillermic) makes advances on women all night, especially Selva (Sofia Boutella) and Gazelle (Giselle Palmer). Taylor (Taylor Kastle) and Gazelle are a brother/sister duo, and he is highly protective of his desirable sister. When they hallucinate on powerful drugs, toxic behavior emerges, displaying racism, incest, and murderous intentions.
The first image in Climax shows a distressed woman walking in a vast, snow-covered landscape to an electronically mixed Gymnopédies №1 by Erik Satie. The camera takes a God’s eye view, looking down at her in a white void — the only notable color is the blood on her arms and chest. She falls into the snow, screams, and crawls into a fetal position as the camera pedestals down, past a large tree, and into the emptiness of the land. The beautiful landscape is stained with blood. Although the context is not clear, this image introduces themes the film will explore.
Whether semi-planned by Noé or improvised by the cast (who were all familiar with his work), Climax demonstrates concepts prominent in his previous films that fit with the New Extreme — especially the dissolving of social constructs to reveal underlying transgressions within the French characters. Noé says he did not intend political messages but acknowledges how the ideas were possibly unconscious decisions like the French flag prominently displayed in the auditorium where most of the film occurs.[39] As in Irreversible, the art direction by Philippe Prat emphasizes yellow walls and a big red dance floor, complemented by Debie’s lighting design. The diverse group of French citizens with different races, genders, and sexual orientations — come together in a celebration of dance and patriotism. However, through LSD, the expressive quality of dance transforms into destruction. Whether intentional or not, Climax dramatizes the animosity between members of a society, which they try to suppress. They ultimately emerge, illustrating West’s theories of lingering sins within France.
Noé turns the film into a social experiment through improvisational form and cinematography. Like Taylor’s everyday theories, Climax begins with normal routines (in this case, dance routines) before being interrupted by troubling forces. Rather than immersing the viewer within the characters’ headspace, he keeps the camera distant in the early sequences. The film introduces each character through interviews on a TV screen, the opening dance scene, where they practice their routine. Unlike the rest of the film, the cast rehearsed this dance.[40] Within the twelve-minute long take that starts the film, the camera actively moves with the dance. Often kept at long distances to show the entire dance troupe, but also hovering overhead as they perform. The dance creates a feeling of community — captured visually with long group shots.
When the dance ends, Selva takes the microphone to declare, “God is with us!” After the dance is over, the long take shifts into a voyeuristic perspective, walking around the group and following each person into a private conversation. Noé positions the viewer as an observer, watching the characters perform like rats in a lab test. A new title card stating, “Birth is a unique opportunity,” ends the long take and shifts focus. The actors create the situations for their characters through conversations that highlight individual personality traits. One of the most essential characters in the film is Lou (Souheila Yacoub), who says this is no place for a kid. She seemingly refers to Tito, the child of the group manager, Emmanuelle (Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull). She then asks Selva if she has ever had an abortion. David describes his intentions to get nasty with women. Taylor tells Gazelle she cannot be sexual with her boyfriend Omar (Adrien Sissoko). Others talk about love, sex, and God before returning to the dance floor.
In stark contrast to the opening dance scene, the next cuts through ellipses in time, uses the high-angle perspective like the opening, and the actors create individual language by dancing solo. According to Anton Bitel, a freelance critic for Sight and Sound and Little White Lies, the free reign of the dancers reflects the shift from collectivism to egoism.[41] Because freestyle relies on the dancers internalizing and projecting their emotions outward, viscera becomes physical motion, and their dancing reflects individual sexual desires and hostility. The scene ends with the DJ (Kiddy Smile) declaring, “This is for France, guys! This is war!” As they dance away, their minds seem to slowly deteriorate under the influence. They extend their reach to God, signaling the potential spiritual properties of drugs.
The film’s second half begins with a 42+ minute long take, starting with a close-up of the sangria and maneuvering across the dance floor as the LSD takes effect. The flashing red, yellow, and blue lights become harsher against the vivid backgrounds. Taylor accuses their Muslim friend, Omar, possibly influenced by his over-protection of his sister, and the group throws him out in the snow. Critics like Andy Crump (RogerEbert.com) have interpreted this as a symbol of France’s discrimination toward Muslims, which Noé denies as his intent but does not confirm or deny whether it was the cast’s intention.[42] Any sense of logic or social constructs disintegrate, leaving many characters abrasive.
At this point, characters embody Palmer’s cinéma du corps, becoming violently decisive because of rash impulsivity. The cinematography representing their breakdown resembles a stream of consciousness. Debie’s lighting intensifies reds and greens, invoking Dario Argento’s Suspiria, where the colors symbolize fear and detachment from reality. The most horrific case comes when Selva finds Lou, who confesses that she is pregnant and does not know what to do (an idea of Noé). One of the dancers, Dom (Mounia Nassangar), finds she did not drink and assumes she is the culprit. Believing she is lying about her pregnancy, Dom kicks Lou in the abdomen, killing the unborn child. When Lou confronts her, she is taunted by many in the troupe and begins hitting herself in the abdomen: she cuts her arms with a knife — revealing herself as the bloodied figure in the opening. The last image of Dom in the end is her crying, suggesting a realization of what she did. Noé characterizes Lou similarly to Alex in Irreversible, where she suffers permanent damage from the people closest to her. Like Marcus, Dom would not have consciously hurt Lou but, pushed to an extreme, becomes someone she never thought possible.
As the night goes on, everyone’s mind deteriorates. After Lou’s abuse, Selva walks through the halls, flings her body around, yelling, screaming, and laughing maniacally.[43] Upon returning to the auditorium, Selva watches David ambushed by the black dancers led by Taylor, who calls him a “piece of white shit,” draws a swastika on his forehead, and goes to protect his sister. David finds Taylor and Gazelle making out in a bathroom, revealing his overprotection to be an incestuous desire that he attempted to keep dormant. Gazelle runs away when he chases her into the hellish red auditorium: the camera spins upside-down, turning their world on its head. What was once normal gets reversed. With no fear, these characters participate in murder, orgies, and incest in this fever dream of dance.
The film’s final title card states, “Life is a collective impossibility.” Climax demonstrates a collection of characters representative of social building blocks gone awry. Noé shows how many facets on which communities are built are undone by provocation. Through “extremity,” we see how gender dynamics, race relations, religion, and God-fearing patriotism are merely false ideas when humans descend into primal behavior.
CONCLUSION
It is fitting that Climax alludes to films that inspired the New Extreme because it can be seen as Noé’s swan song to the movement. The following year, he made Lux Æterna (2019) — a mockumentary thriller exploring filmmaking’s egotistical and destructive side. The setting is a fictional witch-burning movie, which tributes the climax of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943).[44] Title cards are woven with quotations from directors like Dreyer, Godard, Luis Buñuel, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder about filmmakers having complete control, even if it means becoming a dictator (in Fassbinder’s words).[45] (Although Noé is known for brutal depictions, at no point have cast or crew members accused him of mistreatment.) Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist), Béatrice Dalle (Trouble Every Day), and two of Noé’s actors, Karl Glusman (Love) and Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull (Climax), play fictional versions of themselves. Lux Æterna, perhaps, is Noé’s exploration of many directors’ extreme tactics to create great art through intense means. Split-screen effects illustrate the chaotic nature of filmmaking and disoriented mindsets on set. The peak of Noé’s experimentation with representing a decomposing mind would come with his next feature, Vortex (2021), signaling a new direction in his career.
Noé’s life changed considerably by the time Vortex came about. In early 2020, he suffered a near-fatal brain hemorrhage and had only a 10% chance of surviving without brain damage. Miraculously, he achieved it.[46] Throughout 2020, Noé lost three father figures: his girlfriend’s father, Philippe Nahon, and Fernando E. Solanas. Noé says he always would have made a film like Vortex, but the sentiment he felt with Haneke’s Amour (2012) — which he saw after his mother died in his arms following years of battling dementia — and Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020) heavily influenced him.[47]
Vortex begins with a dedication: “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.” Noé cast two of his inspirations, Dario Argento and actress Françoise Lebrun (The Mother and the Whore), as an elderly couple. Lui (Argento) suffers from a heart condition, while his wife, Elle (Lebrun), has dementia. Age has deteriorated their minds and bodies. The constant disorientation of the split-screen cinematography, emphasize a profound contemplation about mortality. For the first time in his career, Noé earned near-universal praise from critics. Many signaled this film as a turning point in his career, like that of his contemporary Michael Haneke.[48]
Currently, Noé is 60 years old and says he is no longer interested in making shocking movies. After seeing Haneke’s success with his post-extremity films, he believes there is more about life to explore in his films.[49] What the future holds for his career remains to be seen. However, the former “enfant terrible” of the New Extreme remains the movement’s centerpiece.[50] From the beginning, he was a pioneer for a group of brash, bold filmmakers with much to critique about their country. While Noé says he does not fear death and accepts that everything will end,[51] his audacious mark on modern French and European cinema will remain.
ENDNOTES
[1] Noé co-founded the company with Lucile Hadžihalilović to support unconventional productions of all lengths and formats: from micro-shorts and music videos to mediums, commissioned works, and, most notoriously, a run of incisive combative features (Palmer, Senses of Cinema).
[2] Critics have repeatedly nicknamed Noé as the enfant terrible of French cinema since the controversy of Irreversible, which he embraced.
[3] These art movements experimented with abstract form and bold colors in response to political turmoil in Argentina following the military coup d’état that ousted President Juan Perón (Frank).
[4] Palmer is also the author of Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema and The New Extremism in Cinema and has conducted numerous personal interviews with Noé.
[5] Imran Firdaus wrote his dissertation, The Cinema of Gaspar Noé: A Poetics of Transgression, at the University of Technology Sydney.
[6] West states the movement combines historical and current social ills in a collective statement about everyday extremity, citing Mathieu Kassovitz’s statement in a 2005 debate with Nicolas Sarkozy of French history stained with the blood of the innocent.
[7] Many critics and historians regard Haneke as “the godfather of extremity,” citing his work from the 1980s — 2000s as the most influential on the movement.
[8] Noé’s script consisted only of scene descriptions and layouts; the actors improvised their dialogue.
[9] Noé acknowledges in an IndieWire interview from 2016 that he capitalized on the popularity of Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) and its reverse narrative to pitch “Irreversible” to producers. However, the inspiration for the reverse narrative came from the Harold Pinter play Betrayal (1978). (Firdaus)
[10] Interview with David Sterritt in 2007 for Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
[11] The day after its premiere, BBC published an article titled “Cannes film sickens audience,” reporting 250 people walked out and 50 needed medical assistance after fainting.
[12] David Ansen, film critic for Newsweek, wrote an article titled, How far is too far, stating it would be the most walked-out-of movie of 2003.
[13] Quandt’s article accused extremity filmmakers of defilement and exploitation, leading many to believe he did not consider intent or purpose.
[14] Interview with Geoffrey Macnab for The Guardian in 2002, para. 14.
[15] Many of Noé’s contemporaries, like Breillat and Virginie Despentes (Baise-moi), defend his use of sexual violence. Both depicted rape scenes in their films.
[16] The nine most recent critic’s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, with seven coming after the MeToo movement. Rape survivors like Jenn Adams commend Noé for his authentic approach.
[17] Noé says he saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) when he was six years old at the Cosmos 70 in Buenos Aires, and his life was forever changed.
[18] Debie graduated from L’Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) with a major in ‘Image.’ Other films in his repertoire include Innocence (2004), Spring Breakers (2012), and Submergence (2017).
[19] Though never accepted by scientists, Dunne’s theories of precognitive dreams have inspired numerous science fiction and fantasy stories.
[20] West notes this is the frequency French police use against mobs and riot groups to create a feeling of nausea.
[21] Not to be confused with body horror, Palmer assesses the body as a means of confrontation that redefined French cinema in the modern age and transitioned artistic possibilities away from the romanticism of previous generations.
[22] France adopted a “color-blind” approach to policymaking where citizens are not allowed to identify by race, even removing the word “race” from the constitution in 2018. It is considered a taboo subject and reminds them of Nazi Germany. These policies do not allow any progress in issues of structural racism. (LaBreck)
[23] Firdaus states that Noé uses rape as a core topic because it represents not only violence against women and men but suggests a vulgar display of power against oppressed people. (54)
[24] Interview with Geoffrey Macnab for The Guardian in 2002, para. 8.
[25] Noé claims he suggested a line about anal sex to Cassel on the day of the shooting and for the rape to be anal instead of vaginal. However, he states that since everything was shot chronologically, he did not plan for these connections to occur. To what degree he planned or improvised is hard to determine. However, many critics and authors draw connections between the words and actions of Marcus and Le Tenia. (Firdaus 201)
[26] Interview in 2010 with Matt Fagerholm for HollywoodChicago, para. 10.
[27] Enter the Void was intended to be his second feature but was too ambitious to make at the time. He made Irreversible in the meantime while developing Enter the Void, and only then was he able to fund the project.
[28] Interview in 2010 with Matt Fagerholm for Hollywood Chicago, para. 2.
[29] Interview with Hunter Stephenson for Interview Magazine, para. 6.
[30] In an interview in 2011 with Nigel M. Smith from IndieWire, he attributes to Kubrick the influence for connecting films, para. 4–6.
[31] In the interview with Hollywood Chicago, Noé says that despite Buffin’s skill as a visual effects artist (The Matrix), he was not a drug user. Noé brought in numerous cinematic references.
[32] Interview in 2010 with Den of Geek, para. 3.
[33] In 2018, the BBC published an article reporting research by Dr. Chris Timmermann, a psychologist and neuroscientist who researches psychedelic drugs at Imperial College London. It verified escalated DMT levels in the brain during near-death experiences. These hallucinogenic visions lead people to think they have out-of-body experiences and see God.
[34] Negative reviews of Enter the Void, like Walter V. Addiego from the San Francisco Chronicle, cite the depiction of incest as unbearable provocation. Whereas positive reviews, like Tricycle.org, emphasize the spiritual connotations in reference to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
[35] Reported by Katie Gillis and verified by Kristen Fuller, M.D. at Choosing Therapy.
[36] The Tibetan word bardo (བར་དོ་ Wylie: bar do) means “intermediate/transitional state.” The concept gained more acceptance after Buddah’s passing. (William Osler Health System)
[37] Interview in 2019 with Sofia Boutella for The Playlist.
[38] Noé has acknowledged his experience in this nightclub in interviews with IndieWire and A Rabbit’s Foot.
[39] Interview in 2019 with Andy Crump for RogerEbert.com, para. 9. Noé says, “Yeah. But I also, the whole movie was done in a very distinctive way and you’re part of the present time you’re living in. So probably it was an unconscious reason, but, it wasn’t a calculated, predetermined reason.”
[40] Film critic Anton Bitel details the production alongside his essays in the film’s booklet (15).
[41] Bitel suggests Freudian implication of individual ids bumping and grinding against each other. The community dissolves as everyone delves into individual anarchy, represented through the expressive quality of dance.
[42] In the Roger Ebert interview, Noé says he saw the reason simply as Omar’s character not drinking, which led to natural suspicion. However, he again acknowledges the possibility of unconscious decisions.
[43] Bitel documents in the booklet that this scene is a tribute to Isabelle Adjani’s performance in “Possession,” where she has a mental breakdown in a subway station.
[44] The film begins with footage of the Day of Wrath scene, followed by a description of Dreyer’s mistreatment toward the actress by leaving her at the top of the ladder for two hours to get an authentic feeling of horror.
[45] Many critics and historians claim Dreyer’s directorial style to be about finding beauty within life’s cruelties. They debate to what extent his methods were sadistic, which Dreyer adamantly denied.
[46] Even with this near-fatal hemorrhage, Noé says he has yet to have an out-of-body experience.
[47] Interview in 2021 with Kyle Buchanan for the New York Times. Noé took care of his mother for six years before she died in 2012.
[48] Reviews from critics Xan Brooks (The Guardian), Stephanie Zacharek (Time), and Glenn Kenny (Roger Ebert) call attention to Noé’s shift toward “slow cinema.”
[49] Interview with the Golden Globes in 2023.
[50] Nearly all discussions of the New Extreme highlight Irreversible as the cornerstone of the movement, its impact on French cinema, and its influence on future extremity filmmakers.
[51] New York Times interview.
FILM/VIDEOGRAPHY
Central Noé films discussed:
Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, France, 2002)
Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, France/Germany/Italy, 2009)
Climax (Gaspar Noé, France/Belgium, 2018)
Secondary Noé films discussed:
Carne (Gaspar Noé, France, 1991)
I Stand Alone (Gaspar Noé, France, 1998)
Love (Gaspar Noé, France/Belgium, 2015)
Lux Æterna (Gaspar Noé, France, 2019)
Vortex (Gaspar Noé, France/Belgium/Monaco, 2021)
Other films mentioned (In order of release date):
Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1943)
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, USA, 1954)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, USA/UK, 1968)
The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, France, 1973)
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy/France, 1975)
Suspiria (Dario Argento, Italy, 1977)
Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, France/West Germany, 1981)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg, Canada, 1983)
Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (Fernando E. Solanas, Argentina/France, 1985)
Sur (Fernando E. Solanas, Argentina, 1988)
The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, Austria, 1989)
Benny’s Video (Michael Haneke, Austria/Switzerland, 1992)
Romance (Catherine Breillat, France, 1999)
Pola X (Leos Carax, France/Switzerland/Germany/Japan, 1999)
Memento (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2000)
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2001)
Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, France/Germany/Japan, 2001)
Caché (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/Italy, 2005)
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, France/Canada, 2008)
Antichrist (Lars von Trier, Denmark/France/Germany/Italy/Poland/Sweden, 2009)
House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello, France, 2011)
Amour (Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany, 2012)
The Father (Florian Zeller, France/UK, 2020)
Titane (Julia Ducournau, France/Belgium, 2021)
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