In addition to his own films, Noé is also known for his involvement with the French film collective “La Bande des Quatre,” also known as “The Wild Bunch.” This group of filmmakers, which includes Noé, Bruno Dumont, Claire Denis, and the late Jean-Luc Godard, is known for their unique and often challenging approaches to cinema. Together, they have pushed the boundaries of the medium and influenced a generation of filmmakers.

One of Noé’s most notable techniques is his use of first-person perspective, which he employs to great effect in his 2009 film “Enter the Void” (2009). In this film, the viewer is put in the shoes of the protagonist, following his every move and even seeing the world through his eyes, complete with the character’s visual eye-blinks.

Photosensitive Warning: Read Before Playing! A very small percentage of individuals may experience epileptic seizures when exposed to certain light patterns or flashing lights. (this is true of most Noé films).

In addition to his use of first-person perspective, Noé is known for his experimental and avant-garde approach to storytelling. He often employs nonlinear narratives and long takes, as well as elaborate camera movements and visual effects, to create a unique and immersive viewing experience.

Noé’s films often deal with heavy themes such as violence, sexuality, and drug use, and have garnered both critical acclaim and controversy for their raw and unflinching portrayal of these subjects. His 2002 film “Irreversible” (2002) caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival with its graphic depiction of rape and revenge. The film is shot in reverse chronological order, with the events of the film unfolding in reverse from the end to the beginning. His 2015 film “Love” depicted a young couple’s tumultuous relationship through a series of explicit and often-graphic sex scenes.

Despite the controversy surrounding his work, Noé has received numerous accolades and awards throughout his career. “I Stand Alone,” (1998) his first feature-length film, won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and “Irreversible” was nominated for the Palme d’Or. In 2015, he won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for “Love.”

My characters are never heroic. They are mostly lost and trying to find the right door to open and they end up opening the wrong doors.
– Gaspar Noé

In recent years, Noé has continued to push the boundaries of cinema with his bold and provocative films. His 2018 film “Climax” followed a group of young dancers as they descend into madness after accidentally consuming spiked sangria.

One of Gaspar Noé’s more recent films, “Vortex,” (2021) tells the story of a couple whose ability to care for one another becomes compromised as they age and one develops dementia. Despite the difficult subject matter, the film is quietly devastating, and Noé’s use of split screen throughout the film effectively highlights the subjectivity of each partner in the relationship and their decline. I had the opportunity to see “Vortex” at a private press screening in Los Angeles, and was struck by the intimacy and compassion with which Noé approached the subject.

In “Lux Aeterna” (2019) two actresses, Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, are on a film set telling stories about witches. However, the film is not just about this subject matter – it is also an exploration of cinema itself, and the passion and love for the medium. Additionally, the film delves into the sometimes chaotic and frenetic world of on-set hysterics.

Photosensitive Warning:

Noé’s career as a filmmaker has been defined by his willingness to tackle difficult and taboo subjects and his distinctive and experimental approach to storytelling. While his films may not be for everyone, there is no denying the impact and influence he has had on the world of cinema.

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Here we are met with a split-screen depicting the respective zones of central characters – an elderly couple comprising a senior gentleman writer played by Dario Argento (arguably best known as the writer/director of 1997 horror classic Suspiria), his wife – a former psychiatrist whose cognitive abilities are rapidly declining due to dementia played by Francoise LeBrun (whose incredibly prolific career reaches back to 1971) and their wayward son trying desperately to take on the new role of managing their well-being – played by Alex Lutz.

I was immediately struck by the accuracy of the aesthetic tone – the color timing of the apartment home where the couple lives hits the exact spectrum of slightly faded, washed-out earthen hues of my grandparent’s home. The mise-en-scene is like a frame from my memory – books and newspapers lay in piles, old rugs over old carpets, the planters hanging overworn tile on the balcony where a wrought iron table sits upon a layer of grimy dust where the rag has not wiped it away. The lighting feels like available light, yet always highlights precise elements within the frame amid the pervasive dimness of the world. This is very different from the established Wild Bunch hyper-contrast, ultra-vivid fare of the past.

Though the split-screen could easily become a gimmick, it feels inevitable here – sometimes overlapping the actors such that we see their hands clasped together in both, but slightly distended, or compressing the face of another. At times the screen is used for synchronicity – mirroring the father and the son in their respective worlds, for example, or the fatigued postures of each of the couple, in their respective zones of the house, and at other times for contrast – young vs old, calm vs danger, warm vs cold. One particularly striking compositional moment ha the father and son speaking in his amber-lit writing office, while in the right frame the mother and grandson play in the pallid cold twilight outside of the house. Yet we are connected back by the amber glow punching through the curtains in the blue world, privy to both realities, which at that moment are so far apart.

In his book “The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema” (2000) Jean Mitry explores two different forms of montage – “that of the frame showing a single scenario in isolation” and in sequence or by putting them side-by-side.¹ This extends Andre Bazin’s (2004) principle of authenticity via the “Full Length Shot” – which describes an unmitigated capture of real-time flow that we have also seen in Goodfellas (1990), various Altman films (for eg The Player 1992), Russian Ark (2002), Birdman (2014) in what feels like an ongoing thread of oneupmanship to craft the master long single choreographed take. Here Noé uses this superimposition of real-time experience and Full-Length Shot theory together to immerse us into the experience of a couple bound together and at an impossible distance simultaneously, to breathtaking effect, but always understated. It is a real-time experience, a soporific one, a contemplative one, a melancholic one, split in two.

What is ironically more striking in Vortex is how subdued and restrained it all is. He often takes a Tarkovskian pace to let a scene play out. And to that point – it all feels quite improvised, though the writing is so well structured that it feels like a well-worn play that has been done hundreds of times. What we have is a highly sentimental, oft heart-aching take on Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

I waited for that moment in which Noé punches through the wall of decency with something so galling that it creates trauma, but here it takes nothing more than a child with a toy to create an excruciating moment of tension. In another moment Mercedes Sosa’s Gracias a La Vida or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan play so faintly in the diegetic background as to be almost indetectable but to those who can pick up the cues and references, to incept in the unconscious with something larger and more sublime than this tired apartment where the couple lives out their days.

1. I am drawing on the essay Zheng, L., & Si, M. (2020). Narrative Strategies in VR Movies, Traditional Movies, and Digital Games. In J. Morie, & K. McCallum (Ed.), Handbook of Research on the Global Impacts and Roles of Immersive Media (pp. 59-78). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-2433-6.ch004 to draw this comparison to the film theorists’ argument

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