My ritual to keep myself sane during times of corona became consuming movies religiously. Every evening I settle down on my couch with a cozy blanket and a cup of tea or, when necessary, a glass of wine to ease all anxious thoughts. However, this ritual is not a senseless assassination of time. Rituals need to have a use. A reason. A learning curve - at least for me. So, I created the ritualistic mission to watch all A24 movies. A film production house that with every movie seems to question what cinema can be through exploration of cinematic rules. Today we will discuss their French movie Climax. And to understand Climax we need to look back at aggro performances 1960’s avant-garde theatre. Are you ready for bare bodies and obscure orgies and violent visuals? The examination of social commandments?
Climax is not a movie like any other. It does not follow cinematic rules. Not the rules of narrative. Not the rules of framing. Not even the rules of making.
Gaspar Noé, the director of Climax, found inspiration for the movie in two sources. A true LSD-spiked dancer’s afterparty. And the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. On a symbolic level the movie explores the idea of the powerful human tool of creation gone damned through the lack of gracious communication and genuine connection. By the end of the movie the tower has fallen and humanity will forever remain corrupted. Unity has become a lost cause.
We can discuss the cinematic rules of narrative. Or the cinematic rules of framing. But I think Climax most deeply comments on the rules of cinematic making. How the movie was constructed ironically lives in juxtaposition of the movie’s symbolic meaning. At least on the surface…
Climax was made without a script.
Let me rephrase that; Climax was made with only a main idea in mind and was constructed through the improvisation of the actors of whom most never acted before and only worked as dancers. The shooting of the scenes happened organically and the movie was created through chronologically capturing the story as it played out over 14 days of acting. At day one not even the director knew where the movie would end on day fourteen.
This concept of producing brings me to what I mentioned earlier: the aggro performances of 1960’s avant-garde theatre. The Living Theatre was an American theater company that became most known for Paradise Now. Paradise Now explored the liberating transformative experience of both actor and spectator. To do this the actors within Paradise Now improvised most of the performance through reaching out to the audience with the aim to explore, and disrupt, social taboos.
Paradise Now was designed to be an attack on all senses in order to wake up the audience in both nerves and heart (hello, Artaud). Just like the story of Babel, Paradise Now desired to unite humanity on the basis of common language. However, this would not be language as we know it. Paradise Now’s language is physical. Embodied. And above all, spiritual.
LSD was an important tool as well, or inspiration, or basis, or distraction, or lifestyle, in the making of Paradise Now. The performance mirrored the journey of a drug-induced trip.
However, The Living Theatre did not account for the inevitable destruction of their Tower of Babel. Unity can be distorted. Distortion can be catastrophic. Catastrophe will only be enhanced in world build in psychedelics. When adventuring in a drug-induced trip there is no guarantee it will end in safety. Paradise Now became a bad trip when during one of the performances one of the actresses was raped by one of the audience members. The Tower of Babel had fallen.
So why reflect on this piece of theatre history in a discussion on Climax?
The language of Climax is dance. The story is made and told through dance, by dancers. It is a physical, embodied, spiritual expression of the narrative. Within the first few minutes of the movie the end credits are shown. This signals to the spectator that Climax is not meant to be understood as we have become to expect from movies. Climax is meant to be felt.
Climax’s spectator quickly has to wake up to the sensory experience of the movie. Just like Paradise Now the Tower of Babel is built through physicality: dance. And just like Paradise Now the unity of Climax will be distorted thanks to the catastrophic nature of psychedelics.
There is no escape from Climax. No means to understand as spectators have been trained to understand movies. The framing is relentless. Turbulent. Ruthless. We, as spectators, fall together with the characters into a LSD-induced rabbit hole. We, together with the characters, experience the damnation of the Tower of Babel.
Yet, there is an unexplainable, explicit beauty in the movie.
Climax, the movie itself, portrays the nihilistic ending of the story of the Tower of Babel. Climax, the making of, portrays the utopian hope of a possible existence of the Tower of Babel.
The Living Theatre made Paradise Now together with the audience. It was built together with the wish to show what a human community could look like. This is not much different in how Climax was made. No authoritarian director. No biblical restrictions of a script that must be followed. Just dancers and film makers looking to make something – together.
In the end Climax leaves me with a feeling of hope that the Tower of Babel might not have fallen after all.
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