About Me
------this is not the real Gaspar Noe.
It's a tribute by Ann "The Great Dreamer" (NO FRENCH SPEACKING) -----
Contact TablesSurprising as it may seem, Gaspar Noé may not be the most well-known member of his family. That honour belongs to his father, Luis Felipe Noé, a semi-abstract painter. Noé père was born in 1933 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, studied art and law, and worked as a journalist. Noé fils was born in 1963, two years before his family relocated to New York where his father was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Having returned to Buenos Aires in 1970, the family moved again, this time to Paris in 1976. In his teens, Gaspar Noé entered school at the École Nationale Supérieur Louis Lumière where he studied a rigorous program of cinema and photography.Noé made two black-and-white short films upon finishing his studies, Tintarella di luna in 1985, and Pulpe amère in 1987. Tintarella di luna tells the simple story of a woman who leaves her husband for her lover. Pulpe amère shows a man attempting to rape his wife as they listen to a radio program of a man expressing his thoughts of profound love.Noé's first major film was the 40-minute Carne (1991), produced through his partnership with filmmaker Lucile Hadzihalilovic (La Bouche de Jean-Pierre [1995], L'Ecole [2003]), Les Cinémas de la zone, in 1991. The film, a tale of a horse butcher who takes revenge on a man he mistakenly believes to have raped his autistic daughter, marks not only the first time Noé incorporated on-screen textual warnings, epigrams, and notes into the filmic narrative, but also the first collaboration with actor Philippe Nahon who has appeared in all of Noé's subsequent features. Carne also includes a number of 'shock' elements such as gunshot sound effects, loud martial chords on the soundtrack, and rapid editing that would become major characteristics of his style in the later Seul contre tous (1998). Between the shocks and warnings in the film, however, there are veins of delicious dark humour to be found: a montage showing the butcher chopping meat as intertitles mark the passage of year after year, and the mute daughter blankly watching Herschel Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast (1963) on television.
© Matt Bailey, July 2003(Matt Bailey has a MA in Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the administrator of The Criterion Collection Forum.)
