The recurring motif Gaspar Noé called a “psychotic gimmick”
Known for his extreme themes and his refusal to shy away from controversial scenes, director Gaspar Noé is no stranger to unusual motifs. From his 1998 directorial debut, I Stand Alone, Noé has tackled sensitive subjects to mixed critical reviews and varying commercial success, but always remained utterly uncompromising in his vision.
Irréversible, arguably his most well celebrated film, is notorious for its graphic rape scene and gratuitous violence. Likewise, his films Love from 2015 and Climax that arrived in 2018 are similarly extreme in their dealings with sex and drugs, making them difficult to watch. But these are not pointless perversions, as the director says himself, “Before being humans with morals, people are mostly animals, fighting for domination and survival”.
It has only been with his most recent film, Vortex, that Noé’s focus has shifted away from the animalistic extremes that he previously highlighted. The 2021 film is a meditation on life, growing old, and relationships rather than his previous foci of sexual assault, violence, and drug use. In other words, he’s switched to the inverse softer side of humanity.
However, none of these recurring themes from Noé’s work garnered the label of “psychotic gimmick”; that applies to an entirely different facet of his filmography. Noé attached the label to the flicker or blink-like moment used to identify cuts between scenes. This device, which draws attention to the cut, is something Noé says he “cannot get rid of” in his films.
In an interview with Filmmaker magazine, Noé went into greater depth to explain his repeated use of the blink and why it is so pervasive in his work. Noé explained simply: “It’s just pretending that you did not do a cut and being clear about that.”
He continued: “Sometimes, when I do posters, we talk about that with the graphic designer. He does an image he likes, and I say, ‘OK, let’s put a little frame around it.’ And he says, ‘You don’t need the frame—just put the image to the limits of the [page].’ But I like it with a frame, and it’s the same with the blinks between the takes.” In essence it defines his work as art—something very necessary when dealing with such brutality.
“It’s like putting the same black line around your visual to mark the borders of what it is,” he concludes. For Noé, then, the blink may be symbolic but it also serves as a very practical limit between two separate scenes. It helps to delineate his stark concepts in a clear way.
It seems that Noé doesn’t mind interpretations of the blink as a reference to the audience blinking while watching the film or a flicker between one character and the next. But there is also something to be said for his honesty in sharing that the blinking motif is, first and foremost, a functional editorial choice.
It says a lot about the director that even his ‘gimmicks’ are highly thought about, and yet, even he doesn’t fully understand the purpose of them.
