Lux Aeterna (2019): Gaspar Noé’s Stress-Inducing Meditation On Filmmaking

Arrow’s new release of Lux Aternae, Gasper Noé’s 2019 fifty-minute film, on Blu-ray and also on Arrow Player and in June comes as his latest film, Vortex made immediately after Lux Aternae, hits UK cinemas and his films forming the centrepiece of the recent New French Extremity season at BFI London, even though he dismisses the term as “a British concept” that he doesn’t believe in. Lux Aeterna was one of those films in one of its few showings in the UK since its premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, and so its home release has been much anticipated.

In an interview with the BFI for this season, Noé explained how the film had to be completed less than three months before its Cannes premiere leaving only five days to shoot. He had initially tried to shoot the film in long takes as he had done with his previous film, Climax, but after looking at the first day of footage, he felt it didn’t work. Instead, he chose to use a split-screen effect that he found impressive enough to also use in Vortex. This wasn’t the only technique that he carried over as the time limit meant he couldn’t write a script and so he put trust in his actors to improvise the dialogue while he was “in charge of the camera.”

With two powerhouse leads Beatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg at its centre, the film contains more depth and intrigue than its making suggests. Miranda Corcoran’s visual essay on the film, the most notable supplement on this release, and an audio commentary by critic Kat Ellinger pick out numerous themes and details in the film, particularly the film’s engagement with the figure of the witch as a historical and cultural symbol.

Corcoran’s polished and lucid essay explains the history of European witch trials and how they were driven by the belief that the human will is deceptive and the body is not. Thus, in breaking the body through torture, the truth will be revealed. Corcoran argues that Noé has created “a meditation on torture and suffering” through this “exploitation film about exploitation.” Its depiction of a film shoot gone wrong is framed through the numerous pressures put upon Dalle, playing the director of the film-within-a-film, by the cast, crew and a mutinous producer determined to make her a martyr if the film fails.

My only previous experience of Noé was Climax and Jean-Pierre’s Mouth, for which he was cinematographer, so I was ready for an experiential nightmare that overloads the senses. What’s striking about Lux Aeterna is how much it holds back. Don’t get me wrong, it is as stressful as the premise suggests as we see troubles plaguing the shoot from literally every possible angle. Everyone on-screen plays a version of themselves using their own names to add authenticity even as their characters stray into caricature. From Max the Director of Photography who feels he should be the director, to intrusive American Karl trying to court Gainsbourg to be in his new film, the film doesn’t have enough time to provide depth to these characters and instead uses them as fuel for the worsening situation.

As such, it fits with Noé’s filmography of using the medium of cinema to enhance the extremes of its story, most notably in this case through the use of strobe lighting. It is important to say that those who have epilepsy or are overly sensitive to flashing lights are pre-warned because even though strobe lighting is only used in the film’s finale, it informs the rest of the film. Scenes are occasionally interrupted with a second of black screen in a mirroring strobe effect, which is made more disorientating when characters appear in scenes in between these strobe-like edits. The strobe lighting bleeds into the credits too allowing no respite even when the film is effectively over.

An interesting supplement on this release provides context for Noé’s use of this technique with the inclusion of The Flicker, a half-hour experimental short film by Tony Conrad from 1966. Noé has specifically mentioned this film as an inspiration but, for me, watching it on its own was more of an endurance test than Lux Aeterna. It is simply a white screen that begins to flicker at an increasingly rapid pace as a droning score plays out. Viewing it at home with the easy ability to look away diminishes its effect somewhat with the warning text slide at the side suggesting a more visceral impact in a theatrical experience:  “the producer, distributor and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury possibly caused […] This film may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment” with the further caution that you watch the film “at your own risk” and “a physician should be in attendance.”

No such warning is provided for Lux Aeterna and instead opens with a Dostoyevsky quote on “the supreme happiness an epileptic feels in the moments before a fit”, suggesting that Noé’s use of strobe lighting is not intended to be solely disorientating. The climactic sequence of Gainsbourg being effectively tortured by the strobe lighting is literally framed by the camera that is filming her, both within the film and by the film itself. As it goes on, everything else is stripped away so that we are suffering along with Gainsbourg and through this suffering achieve a strange state of calmness. As suggested by the critical commentary accompanying this release, this ending does not justify the onscreen cruelty but provides a commentary on how female pain is transmogrified into art.

This commentary is made explicit in the opening scene as Gainsbourg and Dalle discuss their experience of working as actresses. As mentioned before, this conversation was improvised though, as a casualty of the failed first day of shooting, was in fact done on the last day of filming. Nevertheless, it is a frank discussion on what even prominent actresses such as them have had to go through with Dalle, in particular, in full flow. She sums up the discussion in a line: “either you’ve been a beauty queen or burned at the stake.” Having been re-shot, it provides a neat foreshadowing of what is to come as the following shoot confirms their worst fears and that exploitation of actresses and female creatives remains a current issue.

The behind-the-scenes materials suggest the opposite of this experience on Lux Aeterna with photos from the set and the casual and chatty audio commentary by Noé and Dalle suggesting that, unlike the fictional shoot, the actual shoot of Lux Aternae was a chaotic but joyful one. Nonetheless, its critical and stylistic engagement with difficult themes is deliberately difficult to experience but worth it. As Ellinger discusses in her commentary, Noé could be argued as a feminist filmmaker but on a broader level, he has always been critical of society and exposes the punishment of women under patriarchy. And so with this ‘modest essay’, as he described it in Cannes, he has created his most violent film by inflicting it upon the audience in the most aggressive act of empathy I’ve experienced in a film. It certainly gets the point across.

Mike on Lux Aeterna