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And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
GASPAR NOE-Seul Contre Tous
Argentinian born, French filmmaker Gaspar Noe is the most notorious punk rock auteur in cinema today. His first two films, “I Stand Alone” and “Irreversible,” are fucked up punch-in-the-face film experiences that combine dark sex with dark violence. And drugs.
Gaspar Noe: "To make a good melodrama you need sperm, blood and tears."
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Noé has described "Seul Contre Tous" as “the tragedy of a jobless butcher (Philippe Nahon) struggling to survive in the bowels of the country”, but it is quite a bit more than that . Noé’s goal in making the film was to create a film so confrontational and so in opposition with contemporary French cinema that it would be universally despised – a film to “dishonor France” . Noé has been asked if his film, in which the butcher expounds on the evils of women, homosexuals, blacks, Arabs, and the French with equal venom, is racist. His reply was in the affirmative: “Yes, it’s an anti-French movie”.
Noé’s film is not just in opposition to mainstream French cinema, but to all French cinema, even the festival-oriented cinema of which he is a part. It is Noé’s opinion that the “French film industry is very conservative, like the 19th century salons, a private club where six people decide which movies should and shouldn’t be .
The film has been compared in tone to equally relentlessly downbeat films such as Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1975), Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975), Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950, Noé’s favourite film), Saló (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975), Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971), and to the scathingly misanthropic novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Like Taxi Driver, the film features an unremitting first person narration that takes us inside the head of the protagonist, yet explains little about his motivations. Like Saló, there is a frankness regarding sex and violence that would border on the pornographic if it were not for the fact that both films treat the subjects as inescapable and base a human function as defecation.
To this extremely negative tone, the film adds a series of often randomly placed ‘shocks’ provided by the combination of the amplified sound of a gunshot on the soundtrack with abrupt camera movements (accelerated by skipframes) that move the framing into close-up. Noé has described the desired effect of these shocks as “like being electrified, like an epileptic seizure” .
While Noé’s goal may have been to make a universally despised film, he was not successful. What did result, however, was a near complete polarisation of the audience. A few critics responded with bewilderment, but most either loved it or hated it. At the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, the major shock regarding the film came not from the film itself but from the fact that it won the Critic’s Week prize despite having gone relatively unseen at the festival
"Irreversible" is a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable.
The camera looks on unflinchingly as a woman is raped and beaten for several long, unrelenting minutes, and as a man has his face pounded in with a fire extinguisher, in an attack that continues until after he is apparently dead. That the movie has a serious purpose is to its credit but makes it no more bearable. Some of the critics at the screening walked out, but I stayed, sometimes closing my eyes, and now I will try to tell you why I think the writer and director, Gaspar Noé, made the film in this way.
First, above all, and crucially, the story is told backward.
As I said, for most people, unwatchable. Now consider what happens if you reverse the chronology, so that the film begins with shots of the body being removed from the night club and tracks back through time to the warm and playful romance of the bedroom scenes. There are several ways in which this technique produces a fundamentally different film:
1. The film doesn't build up to violence and sex as its payoff, as pornography would. It begins with its two violent scenes, showing us the very worst immediately and then tracking back into lives that are about to be forever altered.
2. It creates a different kind of interest in those earlier scenes, which are foreshadowed for us but not for the characters. When Alex and Marcus caress and talk, we realize what a slender thread all happiness depends on. To know the future would not be a blessing but a curse. Life would be unlivable without the innocence of our ignorance.
3. Revenge precedes violation. The rapist is savagely punished before he commits his crime. At the same time, and this is significant, Marcus is the violent monster of the opening scenes, and the crime has not yet been seen; it is double ironic later that Marcus assaulted the wrong man.
4. The party scenes, and the revealing dress, are seen in hindsight as a risk that should not have been taken. Instead of making Alex look sexy and attractive, they make her look vulnerable and in danger. While it is true that a woman should be able to dress as she pleases, it is not always wise.
5. We know by the time we see Alex at the party, and earlier in bed, that she is not simply a sex object or a romantic partner, but a fierce woman who fights the rapist for every second of the rape. Who uses every tactic at her command to stop him. Who loses but does not surrender. It makes her sweetness and warmth much richer when we realize what darker weathers she harbors. This woman is not simply a sensuous being, as women so often simply are in the movies, but a fighter with a fierce survival instinct.
The fact is, the reverse chronology makes "Irreversible" a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral - at a structural level.
IRREVERSIBLE (2002) (Effed UP Movies) >>>
Irreversible (2002) - Monica Bellucci
Irreversible - Shocking Cinema
“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear … I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.” — Roger Ebert
Inaccessible as mortality itself and as jolting as a bullet to the back, Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void” . It isn’t concerned with aliens or spaceships. It’s about what we’re all obsessed with—pretending to live, refusing to die, and latching onto any ersatz empathy just for the sake of hope. It isn’t an optimistic film in its depiction of the afterlife, but that’s entirely the point—and that’s what makes it sort of beautiful.
Writer/director Gaspar Noé has been a staple of the New French Extremity movement since the turn of the millennium. His debut feature, “I Stand Alone” (1998), was a cauldron of rage centered on a man so seething the audience had to strain to see his humanity. “Irreversible” (2002) existed in the same narrative universe but was thematically adjacent more than anything else. They were neck-deep in social nihilism, drowning in the worst of human nature. But while they were each an hour-and-a-half of vitriol, “Enter the Void” acts as the answer to that: a nearly three-hour dissociation of living, dying, and repeating, all from an atheistic view.
“Enter the Void” revels in death right away by treating it like a breath of fresh air in a world hogtied by plastic. First, the film dives into its opening credits, an assault of flashing words and staccato techno music. It’s hypnotic, sure, but it also feels like a game of chicken between the viewer and a case of epilepsy. Just as we adjust to the anarchy, it dies. Cut to black.
Now we’re in a first-person point of view. We are Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), an American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo. We talk with our sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) on a balcony overlooking a world of neon and, after she leaves, smoke some DMT. Then a phone call interrupts the trip: it’s Victor (Olly Alexander), an acquaintance asking for some more drugs. But he can’t pick them up, so we need to bring them to him.
“Enter the Void”’s climax is Oscar’s death, only 25 minutes into the 161-minute film. It would be the inciting incident in most films, but here it caps off the part that’s grounded to reality. The film then dives into science fiction and becomes unstuck in time for its remaining 136 minutes, and as our protagonist searches for reincarnation, Noé approaches his arc with the detachment often seen in the sci-fi work of Tarkovsky and Kubrick.
ENTER THE VOID (2009) (Effed UP Movies) >>>
The Cinema of Somatic Excess
For Noé, cinema is not merely a medium for storytelling; it is a physical assault on the senses. His work routinely explores the absolute limits of human experience—from drug-induced ecstasy and sexual obsession to devastating grief, violence, and existential decay.
1. Core Thematic Preoccupations
At the heart of Noé's filmography is a profound preoccupation with the fragility of human consciousness and the cruelty of existence. Several recurring motifs define his thematic universe:
The Inevitability of Time and Decay
Noé’s films are haunted by the passage of time. His most famous thesis statement, emblazoned at the start (and end) of Irreversible, is:
$$\text{"Le temps détruit tout" (Time destroys everything)}$$
Whether through the sudden explosion of senseless violence or the slow, agonizing erosion of the mind via dementia (as seen in Vortex), Noé constantly reminds the viewer that human structures, relationships, and minds are painfully temporary.
Altered States of Consciousness
From the hallucinatory DMT trip of Enter the Void to the spiked sangria nightmare of Climax, Noé is fascinated by how the human brain processes reality under extreme distortion. He uses cinema as a vehicle to replicate these altered states, transforming the movie screen into a canvas of subjective delirium.
Transgression, Guilt, and Isolation
Noé’s characters are frequently trapped in cycles of isolation and self-destruction. From the bitter, misanthropic butcher of I Stand Alone to the drifting siblings of Enter the Void, his protagonists search for connection in environments saturated with dread, guilt, and alienation.
Key Filmography Analysis
I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998)
The Premise: A continuation of his 1991 short film Carne, this film follows a bitter, aging, misanthropic butcher who struggles to find his footing in a bleak, post-industrial France.
Aesthetic Style: Brutalist and claustrophobic. The film is famous for utilizing a literal "warning" card with a 30-second countdown, advising sensitive viewers to leave before the climax.
Significance: Established Noé’s interest in the extreme psychological interiority of deeply flawed, unlikable characters.
Irreversible (2002)
The Premise: A devastating story of a brutal assault and the subsequent pursuit of vengeance, told in reverse chronological order.
Aesthetic Style: The first half of the film utilizes wildly spinning, disorienting camera movements and extreme low-frequency hums, which gradually stabilize as the film moves backward in time toward moments of pristine, tragic beauty.
Significance: A masterclass in structural manipulation. By reversing the chronology, Noé forces the audience to experience the horrific consequences of violence before witnessing the idyllic peace that preceded it, rendering the tragedy utterly inescapable.
Enter the Void (2009)
The Premise: Set in the neon-drenched underbelly of Tokyo, the film is a first-person adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, following the soul of a young drug dealer after he is shot by the police.
Aesthetic Style: A continuous first-person perspective that shifts into a soaring, omniscient camera gliding over the rooftops of Tokyo. It features hyper-detailed CGI representations of drug hallucinations and psychedelic tunnels.
Legacy and Critical Reception
Gaspar Noé's work remains highly polarizing. Critics often debate whether his films are profound existential art or merely juvenile, sensationalist shock-tactics. However, his influence on modern cinema is undeniable:
His collaborations with cinematographer Benoît Debie have fundamentally altered the visual vocabulary of contemporary psychodramas and music videos.
He has redefined how sound design can be used actively to manipulate the nervous system of an audience.
His refusal to pull punches has cleared a path for a generation of filmmakers seeking to explore transgressive themes without compromise.
Ultimately, Noé’s cinema is designed for those who want to feel film as a physical, overwhelming event—a dizzying dance between light, darkness, ecstasy, and terror.
Significance: Noé’s most formally ambitious work. It remains a landmark achievement in sensory-overload cinema, exploring death, reincarnation, and memory as a continuous, unbroken cosmic loop.
Climax (2018)
The Premise: A troupe of young urban dancers gathers in an isolated school for a rehearsal, only to descend into a collective psychedelic hellscape when their sangria is spiked with LSD.
Aesthetic Style: Long, sweeping steadicam takes that frame the dancers' bodies as both beautiful instruments of expression and vessels of chaotic violence. The camera eventually flips upside down, mirroring the descent into madness.
Significance: Often considered Noé’s most accessible yet kinetic film. It captures the thin, volatile line between collective creative ecstasy and animalistic tribal chaos.
Vortex (2021)
The Premise: A heartbreaking, slow-paced drama capturing the final days of an elderly couple (played by cult horror icon Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun) as they battle dementia.
Aesthetic Style: The entire film is presented in a split-screen format, tracking both characters in separate frames as they wander through their cramped, book-filled Paris apartment.
Significance: A sharp departure from his highly stylized, drug-fueled spectacles, Vortex is arguably Noé's most terrifying film. By using the split-screen, he formally represents the cognitive division and profound isolation of dementia—two people sharing the same space but living in entirely different worlds.
