Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Vortex
2021 · Gaspar Noé · Vortex on Sightlines
They are on the balcony with wine. An old couple, evening light on the rooftops, Françoise Hardy singing "Mon amie la rose" — a song about how briefly a rose gets to be a rose. The frame holds them both. Then a black line comes down the middle of the screen and stays there for two and a half hours.
Gaspar Noé built a career on assault: the strobes, the floating camera, the corridor in Irréversible. Nothing in that career is as violent as that line.
You can watch Vortex without any theory at all. It works on anyone who has had a parent. But Gilles Deleuze's two books on cinema happen to be the most exact description we have of what Noé is doing here, because Deleuze's whole story of postwar film is the story of a broken circuit — and Vortex casts that broken circuit as its leading lady.
The circuit is simple. In classical cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the perception feeds the action, the action resolves the situation, the cutting serves that chain. Deleuze called this the movement-image. He argued that after the war it failed, and what replaced it was the time-image: a cinema where the character can no longer act on what they see, and so they watch, and so we feel time directly instead of measuring it by movement. In most films this break is a mood. In Vortex it is a diagnosis. Elle, a retired psychiatrist, has dementia. Her brain can no longer turn what she perceives into what she does. Lui has a bad heart and a book to finish about cinema and dreams, and his situation — his wife is disappearing — admits no act that would change it. He follows her. He telephones. He shouts. None of it is action in the old sense.
Deleuze's word for a scene with nothing to do in it is a pure optical and sound situation (opsign, sonsign): you look and you listen, because looking and listening are all that's available. His word for the person inside it is the seer, the voyant — not an agent, a witness. Noé's joke, if it is one, is that he made the witness a film critic. And around the two of them he lets the film fill up with what Deleuze called dead time: the pills, the kettle, the corridor, the long domestic stretches where nothing advances because there is no longer anything to advance. The dossier is right that suspense has been removed. The dedication tells you where this goes before a scene has played. What's left is the dread of duration, which is a different and worse thing.
Now the seam. Modern cinema, for Deleuze, stops cutting to connect and starts cutting to separate: the irrational cut, the interstice, the AND between two images that refuse to add up into one. This is usually a temporal event — a splice, gone in a frame. Noé makes it spatial and permanent. The black divider is an interstice you have to stare at. Two images, each a complete observation, communicating only across a gap that the film never closes.
Watch what this does to off-screen space. Classical framing runs on the relative out-of-field: the next room presses in unseen, and the pressure is the drama. Noé shows you the next room. A character walks through a doorway and materializes in the other panel, and the hidden adjacent space is cancelled. Nothing is concealed. And yet the absolute out-of-field — the beyond you can't locate anywhere in space — hasn't left. It has moved into the strip of black at the center of the screen. Later, when one image goes dark at a death while the other keeps going, that unlocatable elsewhere is sitting in the middle of the composition, in a shape you have been looking at all night.
Meanwhile the apartment itself is being taken apart. It is one flat with real corridors, shared for decades and sedimented with two intellectual lives, his film posters against her medical papers. The split screen cuts it into disconnected affective fragments: same address, two spaces, one calm and one agitated, no longer adding up to a home. And because you cannot watch both panels at once, the image stops being self-evident and becomes something you read — what Deleuze called the lectosign. You choose a side. You lose what happened on the other. You scan back and find it already over. That is not a formal exercise; that is exactly what caring for someone is like. Something is always happening in the room you are not in.
Noé also refuses the one device that would console us. There are no flashbacks — no young Elle, no wedding, no better decade. Deleuze distinguishes a flashback, which is a dated memory you visit and leave, from sheets of past: whole regions of the past coexisting, moved through without order. Elle loops, wanders, speaks to people who aren't in the room, surfaces into frightening lucidity. Her past isn't shown because for her it isn't past. It's the medium she is lost inside, and Noé declines to translate it into anything we could file.
Then there is the casting, which does something Deleuze reserved a word for. You are looking at an old man's face. You are also looking at the Italian horror auteur who made a generation flinch, and at the actress Eustache made indelible in The Mother and the Whore. Actual body and virtual film-memory become impossible to separate: the crystal-image. Noé thickens it deliberately, walling the flat with DVDs and posters and giving Lui a manuscript on cinema and dreams. And in the final movement he lets the crystal rot on camera — pictures off the walls, furniture out the door, the ordered world of two careers dismantled while we watch. Crystal-decomposition, and the film's dedication says it plainly: to all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.
The performances are why it survives its own concept. Improvised, unscripted, carried on rhythm and presence. Argento isn't acting exhausted; a man who is not a trained actor is simply tired inside a fiction that needs him tired. Deleuze's cinema of the body names this: postures and attitudes that carry duration instead of illustrating a plot. And behind it all, Noé's own 2020 brain hemorrhage and the screen split into two halves that can't talk to each other — the brain as screen, which Deleuze said outright, made literal by a director who nearly lost his.
A word on where this sits in film theory. André Bazin's case for the long take and deep focus was that they preserve the unity and ambiguity of real space, letting the viewer choose within the shot rather than being told by a cut. Vortex keeps every Bazinian virtue — handheld patience, available-feeling light, the real geography of a real flat, actors left alone in time — and commits the one heresy, severing spatial unity down the middle. But notice that it severs without deciding. A cut takes your eye and puts it where the director wants. Noé's seam hands you two truths and makes you fail to hold them. He may have found the most Bazinian use of a device Bazin would have hated.
The debts are specific. Haneke's Amour is the template: one apartment, one terminal decline, fixed and unflinching. Noé takes it and divides it in two. Eustache's The Mother and the Whore supplies Lebrun and, through her, a lived-in French naturalism that improvised scenes need in order not to curdle. Enter the Void donates the black title cards and the architecture of a film as a descent through a dissolving consciousness, redirected from psychedelia to neurology. Climax donates the method: build situations, cast people for what they already are, don't write the lines. Lux Æterna, made two years earlier, is where the dual frame got tested. And the deep root is Abel Gance's 1927 Polyvision triptych, which used multiple panels to make the image bigger than a single screen could hold. Noé inverts the invention. Gance expanded. Noé subtracts. The multi-frame image stops being an enlargement and becomes a wound.
That inversion is the contribution, and it is a real one. For sixty years the split screen meant simultaneity, energy, the thrill of more: heists, phone calls, sports. Vortex proves it can mean the opposite. Two people in one small flat, married for a lifetime, who cannot be photographed together. The device stops being a way of adding information and becomes a way of registering separation, held long enough to stop being a trick and start being a condition. It is now available to any filmmaker with a story about people in the same room who are no longer in the same place — the descendants haven't been written yet, but the tool is on the shelf, and it wasn't before.
Here is the question the film leaves open. If the frame is what makes two people a couple, what is a film that spends its whole length refusing to grant it — cruelty, or accuracy? Noé, whose earlier work was so often accused of the first, seems to have decided late that they are not opposites.
Watch it again and watch the seam rather than the actors. It is the only thing in the film that never ages, never forgets, and never moves. Then watch anything else, and notice what an ordinary single frame has been quietly promising you all along: that the people inside it are together.
Concepts in play
- the time-image — Elle's dementia and Lui's heart condition remove every act that could change the situation; the film is a decline charted to its end with no plot, only duration endured.
- pure optical & sound situations — Long observational passages in which the husband can only follow, watch and listen — telephoning, shouting, trailing his wife — none of which alters anything.
- the seer (voyant) — Lui, a film critic writing a book on cinema and dreams, is cast as a professional watcher whose only remaining role is to witness his wife's dissolution.
- dead time (temps mort) — Pills, the kitchen, the corridor, the low ambient hum of the flat — Noé removes suspense and substitutes the dread of unhurried real time across 140 minutes.
- the interstice / the AND — The hard black divider between the two frames: a permanent visible gap across which two complete observations communicate without ever resolving into one image.
- out-of-field-relative — Characters pass through doorways from one panel into the other, so the implied adjacent room is shown rather than withheld — the classical off-screen pressure is cancelled.
- out-of-field-absolute — The unlocatable beyond migrates into the black seam, and lands when one frame goes black at a death while the other continues, collapsing the diptych.
- any-space-whatever: disconnection — One real apartment, shared for decades, is formally severed into two fragments that often differ in light and rhythm — one calm, one agitated — and no longer add up to a home.
- the readable image — The doubled frame cannot be watched whole; the viewer must scan, choose a side and lose the other, so the image stops being self-evident and has to be read.
- sheets of past — Lebrun's loops, vacancy, wandering and sudden frightening lucidity, with no flashback anywhere in the film — the past is never dated and visited, only inhabited.
- hyalosign (the crystal-image) — Casting Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun, indelible from The Mother and the Whore, inside an apartment of posters, DVDs and a manuscript on cinema and dreams: cinema's own memory grown old, actual body and film-memory indiscernible.
- crystal-decomposition — The final movement dismantles the mise-en-scène on camera — the flat emptied, pictures taken down, furniture removed — the ordered world of two intellectual lives rotting from within, under a dedication to brains that decompose before hearts.
- attitudes & postures — Improvised, script-light scenes carried on presence and rhythm; Argento, not a trained actor, registers weariness and irritation as unperformed bodily duration.
- cinema of the brain — The film's dedication to decomposing brains, Noé's own 2020 brain hemorrhage, and a screen permanently divided into two halves that can no longer communicate.