Light up the Void  

Gaspar Noé returns with  Lux Aeterna , a ritualistic film invoking all the evil spirits of cinema. While director Béatrice Dalle and her actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (playing themselves) are confronted by dark forces invading a film set, the ghosts of Fassbinder, Dreyer, and Buñuel also come to sow chaos with title cards theorizing the violence of mise-en-scène. This gave us the idea of ​​asking Noé to react to a few blasphemous maxims.

Antonin Artaud,  Sorcery and Cinema , 1927

"Trance cinema really resonates with me. I like it when a film approaches the language of dreams, nightmares, or those altered states produced by psychedelics. With  Lux Aeterna , many people told me they felt drugged when they left the theater. I play with strobe lights, and yes, that can induce a trance-like state. Quite a few directors, like Paul Sharits or Tony Conrad, have made films with flicker. Depending on the flicker speed—3, 8, or 12 flashes per second—you enter a different mental state. I know that what really gets to me is simply the alternation of a black image and a white image, which makes 12 flashes out of the 24 frames per second of a film.

Suddenly, you get the impression that your thoughts are speeding up or slowing down. At the end of Irreversible (  2002), there was a black and white flicker: at the distributor's request, I had to shorten it because I was told it would trigger epileptic seizures in some people. From that day on, I told myself that one day I would make an endless flicker."

Kenneth Anger on his book  Hollywood Babylon , Le Monde, 2013

"What's fascinating about Kenneth Anger is that, as a child, he played the Little Prince in A Midsummer's Night Dream  (1935), one of the most beautiful and enchanting adaptations of Shakespeare, with Mickey Rooney portraying a little Lucifer with horns. At the age of five, he was immersed in a huge film studio with all those little devils, and it's as if, all his life, he wanted to recapture those sensations in his own films.

I was deeply affected by  2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was my first psychedelic experience; I was six or seven years old. I thought to myself, "I'd really like to know how the director managed to make that film." I wanted to be like the Wizard of Oz, who had created an entire universe."

Carl Th. Dreyer,  Reflections on My Craft , 1983

 "Often, the freedom you're given is proportional to the financial risk involved. If you're given one or two million euros, you're free to do what you want. But on an eight-million-euro project, you'll need big names, you'll need the film approved by the co-producers, and you're not going to get away with it. I feel more comfortable when I'm told, "You have this small budget, but you have carte blanche," as was the case with Anthony Vaccarello on Lux Æterna.

I don't want to have so-called "creative" people from advertising agencies breathing down my neck, telling me what to do. It's a truly awful world, advertising and communications. The most nightmarish shoot I ever experienced was on an AIDS prevention commercial. There were African actors, happy to be dressed to the nines in a nightclub, but the client and the creative team asked me to dress them in boubous so that the French could identify them as "migrants." I told them I couldn't do that, and I told them all to get lost, like Béatrice in my film. Luckily, the producer was 100% on my side."

Lou Reed, in the song Chelsea Girl by Nico

"I bought the DVD of Andy Warhol 's Chelsea Girls in Italy a month ago, and I watched part of it last week, but I hadn't seen it before. This split-screen idea, I'd say it comes more from Paul Morrissey's New York, 42nd Street or Richard Fleischer 's The Boston Strangler . 

But, since everything was improvised, I didn't actually know what the film's style would be at all. I thought I might use seamlessly linked long takes, like in Climax. But the first day of shooting was such a mess that I changed my approach: unlike my previous films, I was going to edit this one myself. And since I was editing anyway, I gave additional cameras to my cinematographer, Benoît Debie , and to Tom Kan , whose character is making a making-of about Béatrice's film. When I arrived in the editing room, I had absolutely no idea what they had filmed! It was funny because, as a result, I felt like two-thirds of the film had been made by other people."

Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh , 1982

"My father, who had a soft Catholic upbringing and later behaved like an agnostic, used to tell me, "  You mustn't say you're an atheist, say you're agnostic! " I'd reply, " Dad, leave me alone, Mom's an atheist and I'm with her.  " My mother was in revolt; she'd had a religious education with nuns whom she hated because they wouldn't let her go to the movies, the devil's lair. Buñuel , you can clearly see he has one foot in and one foot out. Many people who call themselves atheists their whole lives, when they feel death approaching, they call a priest, just in case there's a hell... But, for me, being an atheist is simply being logical. Many sects wallow in blood, but those that have wallowed in it the most are called religions."

Par Quentin Grosset / Publié le 26.01.2021

https://www.troiscouleurs.fr/cinema/mots-croises-gaspar-noe-jaime-bien-quand-un-film-se-rapproche-du-langage-des-reves/