Gaspar Noé filmed by Gérard Courant in Paris, June 23, 1995

On June 23, 1995, at 12:20 a.m., in Paris, France, filmmaker Gaspar Noé was filmed by French director Gérard Courant as part of Courant’s long-running cinematic project Cinématon.

The filming took place at the Bataclan, during an event organized by Canal+ dedicated to short-format programming. On this occasion, Gérard Courant set up his minimal filming apparatus on site and recorded several portraits of filmmakers and artists attending the event throughout the night.

The film is a silent portrait, shot in a single static take, with a standard duration of 3 minutes and 20 seconds, in accordance with the strict rules of Cinématon, a project initiated by Courant in 1978. No sound is recorded, no editing is applied, and no instructions are given to the subject, who is free to act as they wish in front of the camera.

In 1995, Gaspar Noé was still an emerging figure in French cinema. He had directed the short film Carne in 1991, but had not yet released his first feature-length films (I Stand Alone would be released in 1998). At the time, he was closely associated with the Paris independent and experimental film scene, which was strongly supported by Canal+ during the 1990s.

In the portrait, Noé appears relaxed and informal, changing posture throughout the shot, smiling and gesturing slightly, without any verbal interaction. The film simply records his presence over the imposed duration.

Gaspar Noé’s Cinématon portrait is part of an ongoing body of work comprising several thousand filmed portraits, representing more than 200 hours of footage. The complete project is preserved in Gérard Courant’s archives and is screened periodically at cinematheques, museums, and film festivals, but it is not commercially distributed or widely available online.