Date of birth & Location: 27 December 1963 | Buenos Aires, Argentina
But lying underneath is Gaspar Noé's true purpose. He is on a search for the true nature of man. In various interviews he has stated that the films such as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Gerald Kargl's Angst, and Roman Polanski's Repulsion, were films he has been influenced by. Seeing these film, all depicting the brutality of rape, has brought out a fascination in Gaspar Noé; an inner nature of blackness that has made him question his ideas on what is good in himself and man as a whole. Why are people so drawn to rape films? Why do they come to theatres to watch?
By adding to the canon of rape films [with Irréversible], which include others such as Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, Paul Verhoeven's Flesh & Blood, Takeshi Miike's Graveyard Honor Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Jonathan Kaplan's The Accused, to name a few, Gaspar Noé has decided to up the stakes. Not only will he show you a rape, but he will bombard you with a slew of techniques to make you so uncomfortable, you will have no choice but to leave the theatre.
Gaspar Noé begins Irréversible with opening credits that flash and pulsate. If you are epeleptic this can induce seizures, for everyone else it can cause headaches. The reverberated music is repulsive to the ear and sets you up for the opening ten minute shot at an undeground gay bar. Using a hand held camera that jumps and moves and lighting that flashes red and black depicting men masturbating and having violent sexual encounters, Gaspar Noé both disgusts and disorientates you. But it doesn't stop there. If you have fought off nausia to continue watching you now have to contend with the brutality of watching a man being killed when his head is repeatedly pounded to pulp with the business end of a fire extiguisher. All the while, Gaspar Noé has employed a sonic technique used by riot police to disperse violent mobs:
"You can have a physical reaction to the movie, too. Even on the soundtrack, we added these really low waves, infra-waves, so that during the first half of the movie you have a 27-herz frequency that's usually used in riots to make people run away. So for the first half of the movie you feel weird you could show just a cat drinking milk, and it'd be scary, and you wouldn't know why but it's because of this infra-wave beneath." - 2002 BFI interview with Hannah Magill
Once you reach the end of the movie, if you haven't walked out by then, you receive the gift of being sujected to an eight minute shot of a man anally raping the main female character Monica Bellucci. This where I stopped watching.
Even with Gaspar Noé bombarding you with every visually disgusting image and ear numbing sound wave some people have managed to sit through the complete 97 minutes. Even more surprising to many, are the ones who return for a second or third viewing of the film:
"..while viewers will no doubt continue to walk out, Noé maintains there are others for whom the film becomes an "obsession", continually returning to it, looking for something new." - Brian Pendreigh interviewing Noé for iofilm
Many critics will bring out plausable theories on Gaspar Noé's work citing most obviously that Gaspar Noé does what he does to gain attention; the more controversial he is, the more press he will attain. This need to shock is, at its heart, a way of becoming known they will say. It is a way to have a successful career as a film maker. But they would be incorrect. Gaspar Noé makes films to see if the men he thinks we are, are not the men we actually are. If he can offend us enough, perhaps he will find what he is looking for, a humanity who finds his style of entertainment not worth watching; finds his views on the world to be incorrect, finds that the thoughts and actions he depicts in his films are rare at best and not worthy of the time and effort it takes to create them. If Gaspar Noé succeeds in his quest to have "an audience of zero" then perhaps, just perhaps, he will have to change his view on what humanity actually is. For every Andres Serrano's Piss Christ there is a Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl, for every Gunther von Hagens Body Worlds there is a Michelangelo's David, let's see if Gaspar Noé will ever transform from the former into the latter.
Prognostications on Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void
It's been a half decade since Gaspar Noé has made a feature film. He has been quiet since Irréversible with only a short film and other small projects to his credit so every fan of Gaspar Noé has a right to complain that it has been too long since Gaspar Noé has been seen in theatres around the world. Buzz has been building since rumours hit as far back as 2005 that Gaspar Noé has another feature film in the works. Information is sketchy but the buzz has it that the film will be shot in Japan and the script, approximately a hundred pages in length (Irréversible had only a three page treatment) and deals with a set of siblings involved with drugs. Influenced by the Tibeten Book of the Dead and termed by Gaspar Noé as psychedelic, the siblings are in their teens or early twenties and are experimenting with sex and drugs. Intriguing indeed!
Since we have waited such a long time for the movie, we here at Exposure Online Magazine have decided to look into our crystal ball and predict what the movie will contain. We believe Gaspar Noé will mix techniques from both his previous films (Seul contre tous and Irréversible) to create a truly disturbing film. The film will have flashing and seizure inducing opening credits. It will containg a narrative from the male lead describing whats going through his head when he is consuming large amounts of drugs. He will either rape his sister or the two will have consensual incestuous sex. The sex will be both tender and violent. The cinematography will be disorientating using colour scemes of deep reds during the violent scenes and aqua-marine blues during the more tender moments. A handheld camera will be used for some scenes and flash editing will jump in throughout the 90+ minute length.
There will be a small part in the film for one of the main characters from his previous film Irréversible. We believe Philippe Nahon character of the Butcher will not appear but the actor himself may have a small part. The film will be Gaspar Noé's most complex. It will be hard to follow as dream sequences and reality will be almost interchangeable. Many scenes will be shot with a static camera and some takes will be over the 10 minute mark The film will end with either sibling mudering the other and it won't be surprizing if the brother is the one to commit it.
In order to bring his film making to the ne of the film, Gaspar Noé will show the incest occuring between family members which he failed to do in Seul contre tous. He will also introduce a religious element to the imagery and we would not be surprised if necrophilia will be perpetrated by the male lead after he realizes he murdered his sister. It will take the form of a guilt ritual with the male lead shedding tears as he pumps himself inside her.
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But lying underneath is Gaspar Noé's true purpose. He is on a search for the true nature of man. In various interviews he has stated that the films such as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Gerald Kargl's Angst, and Roman Polanski's Repulsion, were films he has been influenced by. Seeing these film, all depicting the brutality of rape, has brought out a fascination in Gaspar Noé; an inner nature of blackness that has made him question his ideas on what is good in himself and man as a whole. Why are people so drawn to rape films? Why do they come to theatres to watch?
