Emmalea Russo

Gaspar Noé’s Perishable Camera
On Irréversible, Georges Bataille, and Simone Weil

“Time does us violence; it is the only violence.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Z

Zigzagging, a dazzled camera twirls around an enraged Marcus. He enters The Rectum, a red and infernal gay nightclub in Paris, looking for revenge. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) is a film in reverse chronological order. It begins at the end. 

Where is this going ←→ where has this been? 

For what is Marcus seeking revenge?

Y

Yellow
Yellow-Red
Blue
Red-Blue
Red
Green
Yellow and Blue
Yellow and Red
Blue and Red

is the order of colors in Goethe’s Theory of Colours. In Irréversible, time and space are shown in vertiginous plays of color and light. The past, present, and future are injected into each other as strobe, blue sky, flicker of white light at the edge of red.

X

The unknown (X factor). For adults only (an X rated film). X proliferates (the x of multiplication) and deletes (the x of x’d out). In xo, the x is the kiss, a conjoining. X marks the horizontal axis. At the center of X, lines intersect then extend into infinitude.

X is the beloved around whom Roland Barthes writes A Lover’s Discourse, the loved object who does not speak and whose absence and silence engenders an entire amorous discourse, a series of figures ordered not by logic or chance but alphabetically beginning with A. To order the figures according to the alphabet, Barthes tells us, is partly to prevent a “philosophy of love” from emerging. The alphabetic ordering guards against subordinating love and philosophy to each other.

In Irréversible, the camera expends immense quantities of energy. This expenditure takes circuitous routes, X’ing itself out as it twirls.

We enter a window where two naked men sit in a room, camera swirling dizzily through putrescent light, yellow-red, which seems to stick to the lens, ultra-thick.

“Time destroys all things,” says one of the men. Outside, ambulance lights make buildings stroboscopic as we exit the room through its window and descend upon a club where medical technicians wheel a man out of The Rectum on a gurney and push him into the back of an ambulance. The red light pouring from the club X’s out ambulance blue.

W

Worn out.

Gaspar Noé, describing the grueling process of filming Irréversible:

But after two days of shooting up the stairs and down the stairs and turning the camera, I’m not a strong man at all but the camera was very heavy. I had done such a muscular effort that the moment this spell of cocaine was over, the pain started and I could not even raise a glass of vodka. 

The camera, an ultra-perishable particle, a piece of spit or food subject to derangement, swirl, and injury, is part of the labyrinthine environment it creates. It gets shot down as it shoots, an extension of the human hand, itself drugged. “We must use them up. We must destroy them by wearing them out,” writes Simone Weil in her last notebook about the will and discursive intelligence. Irréversible is a long heave outward and backward as the camera twirls us/it toward the past.

Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace:

Time as it flows wears down and destroys that which is temporal. Accordingly there is more of eternity in the past than in the present. The value of history properly understood is analogous to that of remembrance in Proust. Thus the past presents us with something which is at the same time real and better than ourselves, something which can draw us upwards–a thing the future never does.

The film’s reverse chronology takes us into the past as the camera draws (us) upwards into a more breathable and stable arena. Whereas the opening scenes at The Rectum are sticky and dizzy with close-ups and fast whirls, making it hard to delineate forms, the zones that open after the nine-minute rape scene in the film’s red middle get airier as the camera makes wider twirls into open space. The light cools, red to blue.

V

Violent, in Middle English, was applied in reference to sunlight, smoke, and heat. Too bright, too hot, too much. The film’s twirling camera enacts a certain formal violence – too bright, too fast, too shaky – and is itself nauseous, drugged, and subject to violation. The labyrinthine, intestinal space of the film is drunken and open to contagion.

Twelve minutes and fourteen seconds in, a low droning begins as we/it get spun into a red bulb. Black screen. Red light. Black screen. Red light. Occasional blue relief. Here, camera and club lights make flickers as they move, heating and cooling a room in swings.

The camera’s rapid, energetic, haphazard movements appear violated as they violate — emanating from the central violence — the nine-minute uninterrupted rape scene at the film’s center for which the camera was on the ground. Here, the chronic violence of irreversibility, time’s thick resistance to violation. Even when chronological order is flipped, reversed, and played back, each piece is intact.

The film’s reversed chronology also distorts movement, vision, and hue.

In The Rectum, a vengeful Marcus is warned by his friend Pierre: “Even animals don’t seek revenge.” Because of the film’s structure, we have already seen that Marcus ends up in an ambulance, eyes slipping between open and shut.

“Suffering is nothing, apart from the relationship between the past and the future, but what is more real for man than this relationship? It is reality itself,” writes Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace. That time is the “only violence,” as Weil says elsewhere, has to do with its furnishing of the processes of eating and digesting. Time consumes. Saturn/Chronos devours his children. Noé’s hand-camera-us seem to slosh around in a digestive tract, time’s thickness stuffed into tunnels and fields of colorfully lit spaces, chronic, where hand-camera-us get occasional clarifying glimpses mid-spin.

U

Undifferentiated mass of chaos just before eyes begin to sort colors from heaps of light, sounds from clusters of noise. The U of naUsea is near the center of the word, before the sea. It’s a kind of curved naughtiness. Nausea and noise share a root. Red ad nauseum, a curl before vomit, drunk with rage and camera heave.

T

Twirling, the camera spins out from the violent red-lit center, moving rapidly in shocked spins neither totally absorbed nor excreted.

S

Sacred, in the work Georges Bataille, has two poles: the left-hand and the right-hand (following sociologist Émile Durkheim). We might read Noé’s camera (twirled by a hand, worn out, subject to weather) as part of the left-hand sacred which Bataille associates with impurity, shattering, monstrosity, and that which appears abject, low, or formless. The left-hand is opposed to/always in conversation with the right-hand sacred, which Bataille associates with the heights, wholeness, order, and stability. In his study of Georges Bataille and Simone Weil, Saints of the Impossible, Alexander Irwin writes: “To the triumphant ‘right’ sacred of the generals, ministers, and fascist chiefs, Bataille juxtaposes the ‘left and immediately repellent sacred’ learned from extravagant automutilators who perished defying Caesarian powers.”

Gaspar Noé on shooting the film: Most of the movie, I was doing the camera, it was a handheld camera. And I’m not proud of this but — I’m not a cokehead, I get allergic — but there were some members of the crew that were doing coke and when the camera has to go up the stairs, down the stairs and turn around, at a point, my arms were hurting and my friends on the set were giving me coke. And you feel strong and you feel like a superhero, you run up the stairs and turn the camera. I was really happy that helped me achieve the scene.

R

Red, rectum, rape, revenge, rend.

The Rectum, the club where Irréversible begins, is also the end of the digestive tract which ends at the anus and begins at the mouth. And so the film is also a trip from rectum to mouth and out into the sky, eye reversing through the tract, hitting various corners of Paris, so close, intestine walls.

In the section on the color red in Goethe’s Theory of Colours, he writes: “It conveys an impression of gravity and dignity, and at the same time of grace and attractiveness, the first in its dark deep state, the latter in its light attenuated tint.” He continues: “Surrounding accompaniments of this color have always a grave and magnificent effect.”

At the film’s end, which is the past, Marcus and Alex lie in bed and playfully kiss and touch in warm pinkish hues and sheets. This moment is felt as a relief and a resurrection and also an impending doom, for we know what’s to come. Marcus uses language that’s eerily close to that of the rapist, though his tone is loving, warm, and playful. Like the spectrum of colors which are never opposed but rather bleeding into each other at various frequencies of light, violence and love, tenderness and violation, are shown to occupy different zones on the same spectrum, never totally contained.

Q

Queasy, the start of Irréversible vibrates at a nearly inaudible 28Hz, white noise known for inducing vertigo and nausea.

P

Always also the passage of light through a strip of film.

O

The shape the mouth takes to release pleasure and pain.

In a sonnet composed in 1871 entitled “Voyelles,” Arthur Rimbaud assigns vowels to colors. O is blue:

O, supreme Trumpet, harsh with strange stridencies,
Silences traced in angels and astral designs:
O . . . OMEGA . . . the violet light of His Eyes!

In “Mouth,” Georges Bataille writes about the mouth of both horror and safety. Two poles – opened and closed. Closed: “narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude,” magisterial and safe-like. The O screams.

Like the mouth which variously releases screams, cries of pleasure, vomit, laughter, and expressions of awe, Irréversible is a film that remains open to myriad interpretations and reactions, just as its camera remains open to the plays of energy, light, trauma, and noise in its environment. It’s been variously described as feminist, misogynist, homophobic, formally brilliant…on and on…

I want to read the film in the way that Benjamin Noys argues we read Georges Bataille: “between the gestures of rejection and appropriation.” Noys suggests that we might learn to read Bataille by paying attention to the way Bataille himself reads figures like Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade. Bataille thinks that readers of de Sade who — offended or freaked out — reject him immediately, are perhaps reading him better than those who assimilate his work, making it digestible and domesticated. How to engage with this film, then, without rejecting it and without totally digesting it? To leave it open to consumption and release, contagion, scream and excrescence? To not, safe-like, close it.

N

NaUsea.

M

Either way you move through, M is the middle of the alphabet. At minute 42 in the 97-minute film, the rape scene begins. “Most mazes are designed on behalf of and in subordination to their centers,” writes Penelope Reed Doob in The Idea of the Labyrinth. She notes that although mazes have centers, maze-walkers don’t necessarily know there’s a center nor that they’re in a maze at all.

Irrevérsible, maze-like, is designed in subordination to its center and the camera movements absorb and carry the energy of the environment. Alex leaves the party early. Alone, she walks through an underpass below the city, the camera following close behind as it catches a shot of a red sign with white neon lettering above the tunnel which reads PASSAGE, red lights from the tunnel’s interior seeping out into the street. Inside, the passage’s red crowded stickiness echoes and prophecies the film’s zigzagging start at The Rectum, ultrared. When a pimp named Le Tenia (The Tapeworm) pushes Alex to the ground in the middle of the passage, the camera falls along with her. Both Alex and camera are immobilized on the ground.

Gaspar Noé has said that Monica Bellucci (Alex) essentially directed this scene. As Le Tenia anally rapes Alex, the long shot remains unbroken as the petrified camera lies on the ground. Her hand reaches toward the camera and then retracts back. At the end, the engine of reversal twirls – black screen, fluorescent light – back in time to Marcus and Pierre at the party as they laugh and talk about how Pierre never gets laid. Marcus drunkenly twirls into the party’s yellow kitchen before returning to the dance floor where Alex dances under red and blue strobes.

L

Simone Weil, in Waiting for God:

The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.

K

At the end of the film at the labyrinth’s mouth which is the beginning, Marcus and Alex kiss.

J

Joy is a warm light, a subdued red near the film’s end.

I

In is the not and the within, bounded on all sides by walls.

In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil writes: “Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.”

The film’s nine-minute rape sequence, undiluted and hard to tolerate, has been called “the most brutal rape scene in cinematic history.” The camera, however, is not above the violence but rather fallen, shattered, and petrified alongside Alex. In “The Temporal Flight from Trauma: Irréversible and the Critique of Experience,” Todd McGowan notes that the film is saved from the status of a “pure exploitation film” by the “sheer length of the violent scenes.” “Rather than showing violence through a series of rapid cuts designed to render it more spectacular,” writes McGowan, “he uses exclusively long takes that make it impossible to find enjoyment in the violence.”

When we arrive at the rape sequence, the camera’s fast and nauseating twirls at the film’s beginning in The Rectum become more legible. The club, red like the terrible passage, is hellish not because that’s how the film reads it nor because that’s how Marcus and Pierre experience it (as McGowan argues), but rather because the camera is zigzagging, shook-up, and heavy with the tunnel’s residue. The camera acts as a kind of dustbin, collecting energy and particles as it gets shoved through the environment. It doesn’t move autonomously nor does it act as the eye/I of any particular character. It is moved by circumstance and time. In this way, the camera (how it twirls or stays still, its speed, feel) is not a mirror of one particular character’s experience — although sometimes that might happen to happen — but rather, a kind of porous machine telling us not only what sort of energy and matter is around (and therefore attached to/within) the camera, but also what it’s been through, what prior momentum it’s been subject to. The rape sequence’s intolerability has also to do with the position of the camera — in the passage, bounded, tunneled, petrified alongside of Alex.

H

Handheld camera.

Gaspar Noé, on his experience shooting Irréversible: 

I was behind, just shaking the camera in every single direction. You get excited also by the violence of the actors. All their energy gives you energy and when they start beating and punching, you do the same thing with your camera. The result may look preconceived but it's totally instinctive.

The left-hand sacred shatters what the right presents as whole. Life, for Georges Bataille, happens in the oscillation between left and right, preservation and expenditure, summits and trash-level. We are particles getting swished around, between. These two poles of the sacred appear as plays of light in Georges Bataille’s brief essay “Rotten Sun” where he posits two suns using the myth of Icarus, which he says splits the one sun into two suns. Icarus's father, the master craftsman Daedalus builds waxen wings for his son in order to escape the dangers of the labyrinth where they’re entrapped. But Daedalus warns Icarus not to fly too high. Icarus, ignoring this warning (intoxicated by the joy of flight) gets so close to the sun that his wings melt. He plummets into the sea. In this story, the summit is also the abyss. At the very top, illumination’s highest point, the wing-machines deform, failing Icarus and sending him groundward. 

From the brightest slice of light, night.

As Jeremy Biles writes in his discussion of the “Wounded Hands of Bataille,” “The hand that produces wounds also produces the wounded hand.” The left-hand sacred’s rotten sun, which gets expended, ruined, and destroyed as it ruins and destroys, is the hand/sun of poetry, excess, monstrosity. It is the hand that Gaspar Noé shoots with, which does not utilize its surroundings and those within it without itself getting used-up, expended, drunk, hurt in the process. The result may look preconceived but it’s totally instinctive. It is an ecstatic (absorbed, unstable, displaced, inclined to depart from…) camera, and as Georges Bataille tells us in Guilty: “We can’t make ecstasy an intentional goal…”

This left-hand, handheld camera – perishable – aligns Irréversible with the ethics of both Simone Weil and Georges Bataille, where one gets consumed instead of consuming (the other), where an eye/hand gets moved and from those movements, a film. In Saints of the Impossible, Alexander Irwin assigns Georges Bataille and Simone Weil to an embodied kind of sainthood reminiscent of the left-hand sacred: “Saints offer not airy discourse but their own flesh…” Gaspar Noé, with a heavy camera used instinctively which injures his arm as he films, becomes this sort of corporeal saint.

G

Green results from the combination of yellow and blue.
As Goethe tells us, red and green demand each other.
At the end, Alex is lying down on green grass.
The trees above her are also green.

F

Like Oscar in Noé’s 2009 film Enter the Void, Alex predicts the future. Her words become the film’s reality and her dream, a prophecy. Lying atop Marcus before they leave for the party, Alex describes a dream she’s just woken from. “I was in a tunnel…”

E

Energy, a spin through the tunnel which leads to the subway as if the camera is getting thrown up.

A phone rings. Alex and Marcus’s apartment. It’s Pierre. He explains that his car has broken down and so they’ll all need to take the subway. Another, longer route with more stops, winds, and turns. The light in the room is a warm, lighter red than the tunnel. Almost peach. Marcus and Alex lie intertwined on the bed.

Alex tells Marcus about her dream. She was in a tunnel: “all red.” Then the tunnel “broke in two.” Bright green trees are visible through the open window. The camera follows them slowly, not yet frantically twirling, not yet red.

A poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey hangs on the bedroom wall.

Alex walks down the apartment hallway with a pregnancy test. This passage is marked by red light. The test is positive and Alex sits on a red couch laughing and smiling with her hand over her mouth. The camera twirls slowly, the screen a rectangle of orange for an instant. Now Alex is dressed in a floral dress, her hand on her stomach lying in bed. Now a blue sky, the bluest thing we’ve seen, reverses into green grass where Alex reads a red book about time.

Above the green grass, ecstatic, as children play, a different sort of spin begins. We twirl faster and faster, green leaves and white sky, green and white, green and white, all the way. Somewhere. To the beginning. Maybe. A violent pulse of obliterating light before the beginning and after the end. The words TIME DESTROYS ALL THINGS appear against a black background. The credits play backwards.

D

Drug, digestion, defecation.

C

“...in taking off green spectacles, we see all objects in a red light. Every decided colour does a violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition,” writes Goethe.

B

The past is blue. Goethe tells us that blue makes a “stimulating negation” and combines “excitement and repose.” The contradictory color fascinates him:

“But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances us, but because it draws us after it.”

We might read Irréversible as a vertiginous move from red to blue, rectum to mouth, in alarming heaves of light.

Before the party, before the infernal red tunnel, before The Rectum: Marcus, Alex, and Pierre in an elevator. Alex tells the two men that she’s reading a book which claims the future is always written. The elevator doors open out onto the subway station’s white tiles. The three of them walk through the gleaming passage, arms locked. As they talk about sex and the paradox of talking about sex, Pierre says: “Look, a subway train in the distance, blue and colorful!” as a red advertisement hangs behind Marcus’s head, omen-like. Marcus’s body makes a playful twirling motion into the subway and the camera steadily follows as they ride toward the blue past/red future/blue future/red past.

On the subway, Pierre (Alex’s ex) talks about how he “couldn’t give Alex a good fuck” when they were dating because he is “too cerebral.” He concludes that Marcus doesn’t think as much as he does and so is capable of something like “instant ecstasy.” There are twenty minutes left in the film. “The body talks,” says Alex. The three of them speak about the porous boundaries between ecstasy and agony, holding back and letting go, seeking pleasure for oneself and giving it to another.

A

In his brief cosmic essay “The Solar Anus,” Georges Bataille describes a scandalous sun, a solar anus that is the blinding light of night, deranging to human eyes. Coitus, cadavers, and obscurity belong to this bright hole, the end/beginning of both digestion and eyes in a curious collapse of the senses of taste and sight. He writes of “disasters, revolutions, and volcanoes” which he compares to “violent love” all of which happen “beyond the constraints of fecundity.”

He further reflects on this concept in “The Jesuve”: “I imagined the eye at the summit of the skull like a horrible erupting volcano, precisely with the shady and comical character associated with the rear end and its excretions.” And in “The Pineal Eye,” he compares the “fecal eye of the sun” and “anal maternity of the sun” to the absurdity of the pain which “tears his own eyes out.” Staring directly at the sun, the light goes out.

In Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, Jeremy Biles writes about the labyrinth wanderer in the work of Georges Bataille and Simone Weil: “His eventual rebirth into the world outside the labyrinth is therefore not an emergence into a renewed life so much as an evacuation that can be conceived, through a Bataillean reading, as defecation—an anal birth.” We might likewise read Irrevérsible’s maze-like reversed trip from crowded red nightclub to open blue sky as a defecatory re-emergence. The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning. At the end, the camera floats up from being worn down, ataraxic from expenditure like the muscle of the arm gliding after lifting a heavy thing.

In Life-Destroying Diagrams, Eugenie Brinkema writes that the alphabet is “without reserve; it runs its course, has nothing remaindered as a set, to the point that alphabetic beginning and ending define totality: from A to Z promises exhaustion, no other letters, nothing else remaining.” Likewise, Z to A.

As the camera makes larger, calmer twirls upward at the film’s end, we glimpse Alex from above as she lies on bright green grass reading J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time.

WORKS CITED

Bataille, Georges. Guilty, tr. Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess, tr. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Biles, Jeremy. Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.

Brinkema, Eugenie. Life-Destroying Diagrams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.

Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours, tr. Charles Lock Eastlake. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Irwin, Alexander. Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Macnab, Geoffrey. “‘The rape scene had to be disgusting to be useful.’” The Guardian, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/aug/02/artsfeatures.festivals

Macnab, Geoffrey. “‘Irreversible’ has the most brutal rape scene in cinematic history - so why is it being presented as a feminist film?” The Independent, 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/irreversible-gasper-noe-monica-bellucci-me-too-feminist-venice-film-festival-a9091411.html

McGowan, Todd. Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Noys, Benjamin. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works. tr. Paul Schmidt. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Shoukri, Tarek. “Why Gaspar Noé Directed on Cocaine, Masturbated, and Shot a Live Birth.” IndieWire, 2015. https://www.indiewire.com/2015/10/why-gaspar-noe-directed-on-cocaine-masturbated-in-his-own-film-and-shot-a-live-birth-55975/

Weil, Simone. First and Last Notebooks, tr. Richard Rees. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1970.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace, tr. Emma Crawford. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2002.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God, tr. Emma Crawfurd. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.