Light up the Void  

Gaspar Noé: “I Don’t Tell Stories, I Create Experiences”

Luxembourg – Cinémathèque de la Ville – March 9, 2024.
As part of the 14th Luxembourg City Film Festival, filmmaker Gaspar Noé delivered an uncompromising masterclass reflecting on his career, his working methods and his radical vision of cinema. Moderated by film critic Philippe Rouyer, the discussion accompanied a full retrospective of Noé’s work.

A deliberately marginal path

From the outset, Gaspar Noé situates himself outside conventional filmmaking trajectories. Born in Argentina and trained in Paris, he recalls early works such as Carne and I Stand Alone as instinctive, confrontational gestures rather than calculated career moves. For Noé, filmmaking has never been about strategy, but about responding to an inner urgency.

Each film, he explains, emerges from a desire or sensation rather than a traditional narrative framework.

Cinema as a sensory experience

At the core of the masterclass lies Noé’s conception of cinema as a physical and perceptual experience. He downplays the importance of screenplay structure, noting that some of his films were developed from very brief scripts. What matters most to him are form, rhythm, camera movement, sound and light.

Through long takes, extreme camera angles and immersive audiovisual designs—particularly in films such as Enter the Void and Climax—Noé aims to affect the viewer viscerally before engaging them intellectually.

Time, memory and violence

Discussing Irréversible, Noé revisits his decision to use reverse chronology, describing it as a way to make the audience feel the inevitability of tragedy rather than simply understand it. Time, he says, is one of his primary cinematic materials, something to be distorted, fragmented or suspended.

Addressing recurring controversies around violence and sexuality in his films, Noé rejects accusations of provocation for its own sake. He insists that his cinema is not moralistic, but confrontational, reflecting aspects of human experience that are often sanitized or avoided.

Distrust of rules and institutions

Noé expresses skepticism toward industry norms, standardized formats and narrative conventions. He criticizes the pressure to conform to established models of storytelling, arguing that cinema should remain a space for formal experimentation—even at the risk of alienating audiences.

He also reflects on aging and artistic evolution, particularly in relation to Vortex, which he describes as a more restrained and intimate film, shaped by personal concerns about time, memory and mortality.

An open exchange with the audience

The masterclass concludes with a Q&A session, during which Noé discusses writing, working with actors, improvisation and creative freedom. He emphasizes intuition, chance and risk as essential components of filmmaking, encouraging young directors to prioritize necessity over approval.

A coherent artistic stance



Throughout the session, Gaspar Noé offers a discourse fully aligned with his body of work: uncompromising, subjective and firmly rooted in the belief that cinema should remain an intense, embodied experience—one that challenges viewers as much as it engages them.