Gaspar Noé Films Préférés | Light Up The Void

Drive-In Cinema

In 2012, Sight & Sound asked Gaspar Noé to compile a list of the films that had the most impact on him:

"This is the list of films that have had the most impact on me or influenced me the most in my life. Against my will, I had to exclude films by Murnau, Lang, Von Stroheim, Browning, Dreyer, Belson, Pontecorvo, Wakamatsu, Fassbinder, Eustache, Cavalier, Cronenberg and Mungiu, all of which were on my much more extensive initial list." GN

SCORPIO RISING

Kenneth Anger, 1963

"A film as unique as it is perfect. Just like Un Chien Andalou , I can watch it again and again without ever getting tired of it. A great aesthetic experience that can only be compared with Anger 's other masterpiece , I nauguration of the Pleasure Dome. " GN

UN CHIEN ANDALOU/

An Andalusian Dog

/

Luis Buñuel, 1929

"If there is one premiere I would dream of attending, it is that of this film which was decades ahead of its time.

There are plenty of directors whose films make people jealous, but in Buñuel's case, it's also his life that makes people jealous.

"These are more tears of joy than a call to murder." GN

ERASERHEAD

David Lynch, 1977

"This film is the second reason why I wanted to learn how to make films. For me, it's the film that best reproduces the language of dreams and nightmares. Apparently, Kubrick once said that he regretted not having made it himself." GN

King Kong

Merlan C. Cooper,

1933

"Another film as perfect as it is extraordinary. I wish I could have been at its premiere in 1933! It must have been magical for contemporary audiences. Along with 2001 and Metropolis, it's one of the three most ambitious films of all time and the greatest entertainment show that I know of." GN

SCHIZOPHRENIA / Angst

Gerald Kargl, 1983

"A great lesson in visual imagination, but also in psychopathology. This film, still little known in English-speaking countries, was my constant reference during the filming of I Stand Alone. It's the most emotional film about a murderer I've ever seen. I had a French-dubbed VHS that I showed to my friends about 50 times." GN

Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese, 1975

"If there's a movie hero I dream of being, it's Travis Bickle. This film fills me with joy thanks to De Niro's charisma and Scorsese's amphetamine-fueled direction. He's the kindest and most cinephile director I've ever had the chance to meet. Along with Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver, this film seems to best represent the gritty New York of the '60s and '70s as the center of the world in which I partly grew up." GN

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975

"The film my mother deemed essential to take me to see the day before my 18th birthday. I was old enough to learn about torture and the reptilian nature of human relationships. To this day, I continue to consider it the most educational film about the domination of Man over Man." GN

SOY CUBA

Mikhaïl Kalatozov, 1964

"A revolutionary and lyrical film where the movements transform the camera into a symphonic instrument, and one of the main sources

inspiration for the long takes in Irreversible and Enter the Void ." GN

Love

Michael Haneke, 2012

"I hesitated to add this film to the list because the emotions are still too recent. I saw it this year in Cannes while my mother was approaching the end of her life as painfully as the heroine. I may have cried more than during any film in my entire life as a cinephile. Haneke brought to the screen the suffering linked to illness and old age exactly as it exists in all families, as it must have existed for a very long time." GN

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick, 1968

"This is the film I've seen more times than any other film in my life - 40 times or more. My life changed when I discovered it when I was about seven years old in Buenos Aires. It was my first hallucinogenic experience, my artistic turning point, and also the moment my mother explained to me what a fetus was and how I came into the world. Without this film, I would never have become a director." GN

To be continued...