The Cinema of Gaspar Noé: A Poetics of Transgression
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2023
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This thesis builds on the scholarship devoted to French auteur filmmaker Gaspar Noé by investigating his dynamic body of work to date. This Argentine-born, French filmmaker is responsible for a highly distinctive body of work consisting of six feature films and numerous short films and music videos. While screen and film studies researchers have sought to capture aspects of his dynamic career, this thesis identifies a holistic architecture to Noé’s oeuvre in the cinematic poetics of transgression evident across the work. It also examines how his creative screen development, screenwriting, and production practices align to produce these poetics. The industrial production contexts of French national cinema are also highlighted.
Noé’s authorship is evident across creative screen development, screenwriting, production, post-production, sound design, and film title design. This thesis draws on frameworks provided by David Bordwell on the poetics of cinema, Adrian Martin on the cinematic idea, Thomas Elsaesser on auteur studies, and Ian W. Macdonald on screenwriting research. The cross-fertilisation of Noé’s creative filmmaking roles, ongoing collaborations with others, and industrial production contexts has contributed to his bold, distinctive, and often divisive poetics of transgression.
This thesis establishes the foundations of Noé’s poetics of transgression in relation to his nonconformist upbringing by a family in exile, his cinephilia, and diverse influences drawn from American and European film auteurs, including Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It frames Noé’s cinematic output via a creative, strategic, and sustainable matrix of production strategies which sustain his position as a leading figure, and ‘branded’ auteur, on the world stage. Taking a film practice and production-focused approach, this thesis foregrounds a new area of investigation into the work of Noé through analyses of his approach to film narration and development of screen ideas, and their materialisation on screen through improvised screen performances, bold cinematography, the agile moving camera, and a sophisticated and intense approach to light, colour, and texture.
This research contributes to the appreciation of the work of Gaspar Noé and to the scholarship of film studies, auteur studies, and production studies. It will be of interest to creative practice-based researchers, filmmakers, and the wider network of European and international art-house screen-industry stakeholders.
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