Random
Enter The Void: OUT TOMORROW
In theaters tomorrow and On Demand on the 29th. Don’t miss this film. Some more whet:
–Steve Erickson interviews Noé: “I saw “Lady in the Lake” on mushrooms and became fascinated with the idea of depicting a character‘s perspective while he’s on hallucinogenic drugs. I also read about astral projection, and the afterlife. I don’t believe in it, but as a collective dream, like flying saucers, I wanted to depict it properly.” and “I want to make a movie that will be very sentimental and sexual. I have a long treatment now. It’s a love story. I want to film sex as I’ve experienced it, which I haven’t seen accurately represented in erotic or pornographic films.”
–Noé and Korine fuck around in Nashville.
Tags: enter the void, gaspar noe, harmony korine, interview, paul sharits, steve erickson, touching
oh man. this is exciting. thanks for sharing, ken.
i just watched Irreversible for the first time and nearly lost my mind. Noé brick-pounds obscenity and revulsion into a ravishing pulpy sex paste. i think he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, and his facial hair looks like it could be detached and used as an instrument to commit unspeakable acts.
I call bullshit!
i am really hoping to get some acid & watch this in the theater.
sort of on my xmas list.
so I get psychedelics and I get filmic brilliance &c. but the first part of that quote seems more like dave chappelle on stoned white folks
from WSJ article: “I also appear in “Irreversible,” masturbating at the gay club.”
now there’s one way of continuing the time-honored tradition of director cameos.
This movie is the absolute shit. Seriously, it is an expansion of the language of film… go see it. And even just on a technical level… it’s been a very very long time since I really thought, “How the *fuck* did they do this?”
cannot fucking wait for this one.
also, watched trash humpers tonight and fucked my brains right out of my scrotum.
A: It’s called post-production
I suffered through this “thing” last month, and it was, quite simply, the most putrid cinematic turd I’d smelled in ages. Noe has the intellectual rigor of a four-year-old with CP and his attempt at creating a provocative “head trip” are tedious, humorless, and downright dull. And just wait till you witness his two leads attempts at acting (*oof*)…and that flat-ass voice over (*ouch*).
Sorry kids, I was looking forward to it too, but this is not the movie you’ve been waiting for. If you wanna see something really trippy and challenging, check out Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” at the NYFF, or re-watch ‘2001’ for the umpteenth time.
For further elucidation, see M. Koresky’s insightful takedown at Reverse Shot: http://www.reverseshot.com/article/enter_void
whoa, good call on the sharits, parallel visions man.
i am still hesitant but excited about this beast. i’ll see it somehow.
The first scene in the Rectum is just… total.
Oh god. I’m scared for you.
The blunt/flat narrative connections didn’t strike me as just having the single obvious function.
Wait – I thought he was the fire extinguisher . . .
I still don’t understand, in the context of that movie, why “time is the enemy” – as opposed, say, to psychotic viciousness (or vicious psychotics) being “the enemy”.
irreversible made me cry the first time i watched it, then i got turned on with a second viewing, think this is probably “a red flag” or something. that last scene with the beethoven score kills.
i had a similar reaction. first viewing had me emotionally wracked, second viewing i was able to appreciate the erotic brutality for what it was. i agree with ken that the first rectum scene is a killer, and the the beethoven at the end is a perfect bookend.
i stand alone just arrived via netflix, excited for that.
The rape scene was just way too unnecessarily long. I understood it after one minute. I would’ve understood it if Noé hadn’t even shown the scene. What was the point of all that negative visual s[t]imulation, other than to make the audience sick? It’s not like he was introducing things that we haven’t been introduced to before.
On the other hand: I thought the whole second scene in the Rectum was good… although showing the guy’s head being flattened was not really necessary . . . or all that useful, I don’t think. Until that point: it was good. The tension, the violence was well done.
Way too much camera-spinning — again, you get the point after a few spins — but I forgave him for that.
But the rape scene killed the film for me. I stopped watching it at that point.
Owen, I’m with you on the rape scene. But we part ways on the camera spinning. I don’t think that was about “getting the point.” It was about being thrown into the maelstrom without any means of escape, no? One could argue the same about the rape scene, but it seemed designed purely to shock as opposed to the opening, which put you inside a head.
Hmm… yeah, you make an interesting point on the spinning. The only thing is that the camera wasn’t doing those dizzying spins throughout the whole film, it was on at certain parts — if I remember right, I think it was only between scenes and not even all of them; I could be misremembering — so I suppose he wanted to give us that impression — of the maelstrom — yet, for practical (and aesthetic) reasons he really couldn’t do it through the entire film . . . so… with each time he did this, couldn’t he have given us the same impression with having the camera spin helplessly for, say, only 10 or 11 seconds — just long enough for us to get immersed in it — instead of keeping it going as long as he would? Because there’s a point at which a certain impression ‘clicks’ with the viewer when the filmmaker is dealing with how long he or she holds an image… and I would think that as a filmmaker you’d want to get to that moment in time and then break away, because 1. the impression has clicked so you want to move on, and 2. you don’t want the richness of that impression to get lost by belaboring it and tiring the viewer . . . or is tiring the viewer really part of what Noé wanted? Was sensory overload and sensory exhaustion — and challenging the endurance factor — largely what Noé was interested in, here?
I mean… this relates to the rape scene, too… I’m just thinking: at a certain point of exposure, a certain vital Notion ‘clicks’ with me, but when the image is held, and held, and held… that Notion loses its vitality as the endurance factor comes into play, and… I’m just wondering: if you have to balance the Notion against the Experience: which side of the scale do you want to favor, if either?
Like I said, in regard to the rape scene: if we know what’s coming, then is it necessary to actually show the scene? Because our imaginations do perfectly well on their own — and in art are often better relied on than the act of presentation is, if you want people’s minds to really start whirring — and we’ve also been exposed to enough of this horrific stuff, throughout our lives — tons and tons of it — to know what sorts of things to expect . . . so in that case I’m thinking: better to just give the viewer the sign that what’s been coming is about to strike, begin to introduce the viewer to that place and then move on to the next thing, allowing the viewer to fill in that really horrible blank?
Which aspect is more important to Noé: the physical Experience of the vital Notion? Or are they equally important? Because if they’re equally important then it seems to me there’s kind of a lack of balance . . . yet it’s hard for me to believe that he didn’t know what he was doing.
I admit it’s crossed my mind that he might be overly concerned with generating notoriety.
Ugh. Another post that’s way too long.
Yes, Owen, I think you answered your own question–it is sensory overload that the director was after. The spinning scenes are front-loaded because…well, in the context of the film itself it makes sense psychologically. I’d rather not spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. It’s an amazing effect because of what it demands of the viewer. You are literally rendered uncomfortable and you have no context in which to anchor this, no characters or situation about which you might say, “Okay, I’m willing to go there.” It’s precisely the moment at which another filmmaker might cut away as if to say, tacitly, “Okay, I’ve made my point, you get the effect, it’s stronger if I don’t overdo it” where it starts to really work. It goes past the point where the brain can say, “effect,” i.e. affix label, move on.
Again, one might say the same about the rape scene and perhaps that was the thinking behind it. But there I did feel acute “effect,” directorial hand, however uncompromising.
Brilliant first 20 minutes; great last 20 minutes; some terrible room-style acting in the middle that took me out of the movie.
Sorry, Tim, didn’t mean to come across like Chris Matthews.
You know… asking a question, answering it yourself, asking someone to comment on your answer.
Oh well. I guess I had to write all that. Documentation. Owen Goes Crazy, Has Philosophical Filmic Conversation with Self.