Light up the Void  

On August 12, 2015, Gaspar Noé appeared at the Pandora cinema in Avignon, true to the image that preceded him: a nonchalant figure, free-flowing speech, a gaze both distant and attentive. For the presentation of Love, the filmmaker was not there to defend a film, but to present a vision of cinema—his own, radical, sensory, and uncompromising.

From I Stand Alone to Enter the Void , Noé has established himself as a director who rejects the viewer's comfort zone. With Love, however, he makes a slight shift: less overt provocation, more emotional fragility. An evolution he readily acknowledges to the Avignon audience. "I wanted to make a real romantic film," he explains, while fully acknowledging the explicitly sexual nature of the images. For him, showing the body is never gratuitous: it's a way of speaking about the passage of time, the fading of desire, the unraveling of memory.

During the discussion moderated by François Theurel, Gaspar Noé spoke at length, sometimes against the grain, always unfiltered. He discussed his rejection of narrative conventions, his interest in physical sensations—sound, light, movement—and his refusal of explanatory psychology. Cinema, he said, should function “like a drug or a dream,” capable of evoking a state rather than delivering a message.

Noé is also clear-sighted about the controversial reception of his work. He dismisses accusations of provocation with a wave of his hand. What interests him is not scandal, but honesty. "Sex is part of life, but cinema often treats it as something shameful," he asserts. In his words, Love then becomes a film about failed love, more than about eroticism.

Facing the Pandora audience, Gaspar Noé adopts neither a professorial stance nor a strategy of seduction. He accepts the discomfort, the silences, the disagreements. It is precisely in this direct confrontation that his cinema finds its meaning. This Avignon encounter acts as a natural extension of his work, a space where the filmmaker continues to provoke, not to shock, but to force us to see things differently.

In Avignon that evening, Gaspar Noé didn't try to explain himself. He exposed himself. As always.