Gaspar Noé

"Few contemporary directors attract as much rancour and outrage as Gaspar Noé. Sex, violence, death, drugs, bodily excretions and the corporeal nature of our existence are constants in his work, which is also technically dazzling and journeys to corners of the imagination that few few filmmakers dare to go." - Ian Haydn Smith (Cult Filmmakers, 2019)
Gaspar Noé
Director / Screenwriter / Editor / Producer
(1963- ) Born December 27, Buenos Aires, Argentina
21st Century's Top 100 Directors

Key Production Countries: France, Belgium
Key Genres: Drama, Surrealist Film, Psychological Drama, Crime Drama, Avant-garde/Experimental, Marriage Drama
Key Collaborators: Benoît Debie (Cinematographer), Philippe Nahon (Leading Actor), Vincent Maraval (Producer), Brahim Chioua (Producer), Blandine Lenoir (Leading Actress), Frankie Pain (Leading Actress), Richard Grandpierre (Producer), Edouard Weil (Producer), Dominique Colin (Cinematographer), Lucile Hadzihalilovic (Editor), Denis Bedlow (Editor), Thomas Bangalter (Composer)

"The son of the Argentine painter, writer, and intellectual Luis Felipe Noé, Gaspar grew up on a diet of foreign cinema, earning his fondness for hallucinatory cinema from the films of Stanley Kubrick… Though divisive and self-indulgent, there’s no doubt that Noé is a challenging filmmaker, creating movies that challenge the possibility of the medium whilst generating public shock at the very lengths he is willing to go to in order to recreate his artistic vision. There’s a method to the madness too, with each shocking gesture of his films being carefully engineered to awaken a concealed emotion from within the mind of the viewer.." - Calum Russell (Far Out Magazine, 2022)
"The poster boy of New French Extremity was anointed 20 years ago, the night his breakthrough film Irréversible debuted at Cannes and became notorious for depicting a nine-minute rape in full. It’s an agonising scene, preceded by another in which a man has his skull bashed in with a fire extinguisher. Who knew bone could crumple like paper? Noé has been offending since, not least with his pornographic 3D outing Love and his LSD trip from hell Climax." - Annabel Nugent (The Independent, 2022)
Enter the Void
Enter the Void (2009)
"Gaspar Noé likes to push buttons. Through the past two decades, the Argentine filmmaker, who has long been based in France, has established a reputation as a visionary with a mischievous streak. His film Love (2015), which went viral on TikTok roughly five years after its theatrical release, features unsimulated sex scenes filmed in 3D. Irreversible (2002) will forever live in infamy for a 9-minute rape scene. In I Stand Alone (1998), a butcher punches the belly of his pregnant mistress. “Your baby’s hamburger meat now,” he says. “Ground beef!” And this comes long before Noé gives viewers 30 seconds warning so they can leave the screening." - Martin Tsai (AV Club, 2022)
"Gaspar Noé is a director, producer and screenwriter. He spent his youth travelling between Argentina, Paris and New York. He studied philosophy and film at the Ecole Louis Lumière in Paris. Noé’s feature debut I Stand Alone (1998) won the Mercedes-Benz Award in Cannes. With a large number of short films, documentaries and features, Noé often disrupts and disturbs the viewer." - IFFR
"The cinematic worlds of Gaspar Noé are bursting with people who, in the pursuit of ecstatic highs, sink to abominable lows. The depths into which the French filmmaker plunges his characters are typically fueled by drugs and sex, bathed in neon hues and characterized by exhilarating camera work that swoops in, around, below and on top of his subjects. Noé’s films can test the limits of even his most dedicated fans. In the 2018 Climax, a young boy accidentally drinks LSD-laced sangria. Love (2015) features exhausting, unsimulated sex — in 3D. Then there’s 2009’s Enter the Void, a captivating, 161-minute hallucinatory trip, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, about a dying man looking back on his life." - Hau Chu (The Washington Post, 2022)
Selected Filmography
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GF Greatest Films ranking ( Top 1000 ● Top 2500)
21C 21st Century ranking ( Top 1000)
R Jonathan Rosenbaum
Gaspar Noé / Favourite Films
Angst (1983) Gerald Kargl, Un Chien andalou (1928) Luis Buñuel, Eraserhead (1977) David Lynch, I Am Cuba (1964) Mikhail Kalatozov, King Kong (1933) Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, The Mother and the Whore (1973) Jean Eustache, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scorpio Rising (1963) Kenneth Anger, Taxi Driver (1976) Martin Scorsese, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick.
Source: Sight & Sound (2022)
Gaspar Noé / Fan Club
Amat Escalante, Stephen Thrower, Barry Adamson, Michał Oleszczyk, John Waters, David Sterritt, Eric Kohn, Jane Giles, Peter Bradshaw, Josh Kupecki, Nick Schager.
Climax