Inside Gaspar Noé...

Gaspar Noé films bodies that love each other, lose each other, collide, or are consumed. He transforms cinema into a physical experience, often painful, sometimes ecstatic. Now in his sixties, Gaspar Noé continues to forge a unique path, at the crossroads of sensory nightmare, hallucinatory trip, and meditation on mortality. A portrait of a filmmaker who looks darkness in the face—and elevates it.

vertigo as a language

In Gaspar Noé's work, nothing is left to chance, especially not the feeling of disorientation. From his earliest steps in cinema, he conceived his films as sensory labyrinths, experiences of altered consciousness, where time slips away and points of reference vanish. I  Stand Alone (1998), his first feature film, already set the tone: the story of a racist and incestuous butcher filmed with suffocating silences, mental flashbacks, and brutal shifts in tone. It wasn't fiction in the classical sense, but a direct plunge into a sick mind, a desperate cry against modern emptiness.

Then came Irreversible  (2002), which would leave an indelible mark on French cinema. The reversed narration, the swirling camera, the unbearable rape filmed in a fixed shot: everything is designed to shock, unsettle, almost make the viewer physically ill. But behind the violence lies a powerful formal intuition: if cinema can hurt, it is because it can also touch reality with a rare intensity.

"I want to make films that leave a lasting impression," he said at the time. Mission accomplished.

A filmmaker of the threshold

From his adolescence, he was fascinated by experimental cinema, underground videos, but also by the classical masters (Kubrick, Bunuel, Pasolini), he dreamed of a total art, which made no concessions to the dominant morality.

This taste for vertigo and transgression culminates with Enter the Void (2009), a hallucinatory journey through Tokyo via the eyes of a murdered young drug dealer. Filmed in subjective vision, influenced by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this insane project pushes the boundaries of representation: death, reincarnation, intrauterine flashbacks, psychedelic visions… The film is a unique sensory trip.

Gaspar Noé seeks neither consensus nor easy answers. "I make films to live an experience, not to tell stories," he says. An aesthetic of the threshold, between life and death, love and nothingness, the sublime and the abject.

Love, drugs, and then the end

Love (2015), is filmed in 3D. In an era where sex on screen is increasingly sanitized, choreographed, and desexualized in the name of political correctness or collective unease, Love dares to be simple and beautiful in its directness. Not to shock, but to remind us that the body in love is a cinematic territory. That tenderness, desire, and sadness can be expressed there without manipulative music or academic editing. Love is perhaps one of the rare post-2000 films to depict sex without fetishism or moralizing, but with an infinite sadness.

In 2018, Climax  Noé confirms that he still manages to surprise: a claustrophobic drama set in a dance school, where a group of young artists descends into madness after unknowingly taking LSD. Strangely political, the film explores the collective, youth, and latent violence. Dance, trance, chaos – Noé's formula reaches an almost hypnotic level of mastery here.

But it's with Vortex  (2021) marks a dramatic shift for the filmmaker. Filmed in split screen, this drama about an aging couple grappling with Alzheimer's disease is a world away from his past provocations. Restrained, understated, and profoundly human, Vortex is as moving as it is shocking. No sex, no drugs, no strobe lights—just the inexorable disintegration of memory, love, and life itself. The film is dedicated to all those "whose brains decay before their hearts."

A free craftsman

Gaspar Noé doesn't direct much, but he directs freely. He finances his films independently, chooses his actors from the street, and often works with a small crew. He doesn't belong to any school of thought, doesn't attend formal dinners, and shuns speeches. What he says, he says with his camera. And so what if it's unsettling?

He is one of those rare filmmakers whose universe is instantly recognizable. And who, despite the "provocateur" label, works towards a kind of inverted spirituality, a violent contemplation of reality. A cinema of vertigo, of the threshold, of doubt – but also, of beauty in its rawest form.

Gaspar Noé is not trying to please. He is trying to reveal. And perhaps that is what makes him one of the last true auteurs of our time.