“Receiving the stranger must then also necessarily entail experiencing his intrusion.”—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus
The films of Claire Denis (1948- ) frequently explore the fragile connections between people and the ways in which the most seemingly inconsequential relationship can have life-changing effects. At the heart of Denis' cinema is a fascination with the delights and difficulties of belonging and otherness, the gravity and gift of foreignness. Often revolving around reactions to the intrusion of the other, be it a stranger or foreigner, Denis’ films insist on the vital necessity of the unusual to coexist within the "normal" world. In films such as I Can't Sleep and Nenette et Boni, Denis captures the mercurial and instant shifts in tone, from the pleasurably sensual to the menacing or the simply unaccountable, caused by the intrusion of the strange into the fabric of the everyday. In Denis’ films one often feels that all is well even as worlds collide and collapse or, conversely, that a grave challenge underlies the seemingly calm moments.
While Denis' childhood in French colonial Africa is reflected most directly in the African setting shared by her debut feature Chocolat (1988) and best-known film, Beau Travail (2000), this encounter with the intimacies and injustices of colonialism resounds throughout much of her work. Also shaping Denis' unique vision are the apprenticeships she served, just out of film school, under a variety of renowned directors, including Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, Dusan Makavejev and Jim Jarmusch – an eclectic company that is itself suggestive of the unique juxtaposition of careful craft and seeming casualness within Denis’ work.
Denis has often spoken of her shock as a young woman at discovering the novels of Faulkner that have exerted such a major influence over postwar French cinema. For Denis, Faulkner “was a plunge into the senses, into terror and the pain of his characters.” These words describe Denis’ films as well. But whatever terror and pain her characters may sometimes experience is outmeasured by the depths of Denis’ deep affection for them and by her curiosity in their experiences of pleasure as well as fear. Even in the unsettling Trouble Every Day, the not-infrequent catastrophes in Denis’ films provoke a sense of wonder at, and even delight in, the sheer weight of existence.
This series presented with the cooperation of Cahiers du Cinéma. Special thanks: Jean-Michel Frodon, Cahiers du Cinéma; Brigitte Bouvier, Eric Jausseran, French Consulate of Boston; Sandrine Butteau, Delphine Selles, the Film Office of the French Embassy (New York); Christine Houard, Ministère des affaires étrangères; Dominique Bluher, David Rodowick, Visual and Environmental Studies; Tricia Craig and the Center for European Studies; Delphine Pertus-Bernard, ARTE; Joshua Siegel, MOMA. Subtitling services provided by Sub-Ti Ltd. Special support provided by the Academy Foundation of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For more information about Cahiers du Cinéma, please visit their website.
Chocolat Directed by Claire Denis.
With Isaach de Bankolé, Giulia Boschi, François Cluzet
France/Germany 1988, 35mm, color, 105 min. French with English subtitles
Print from MK2
An intricately observed tale of growing up in colonial Cameroon, Denis’ feature debut instantly announced her as an auteur of the intimate. Although Denis has often demurred over the film's autobiographical dimensions, many have read her own life story in the coming of age of a young woman, provocatively named France, during the twilight of French colonial authority in Africa in the 1950s. Pivoting around the complex network of relationships that bind this young woman and her family to their “boy” Protée, Chocolat navigates the minefields of gender and sexuality under colonialism with a rare emotional honesty.
I Can’t Sleep (J’ai pas sommeil)Directed by Claire Denis.
With Katerina Golubeva, Richard Courcet, Alex Descas
France /Switzerland 1994, 35mm, color, 110 min. French and Russian with English subtitles
Print from Pyramide
Denis' mid-career masterpiece is based on the shocking true story of Thierry Paulin, a gay, black, HIV-positive drug dealer, transvestite and serial killer who preyed on elderly Parisian women during the mid-1980s. The mysterious, sensitive-- but appropriately troubling-- exploration of Paulin's crimes offered by I Can't Sleep is, however, worlds away from such a sensationalistic description of the facts. By refracting the story through the point of view of a young Lithuanian woman, an illegal immigrant struggling to make ends meet, Denis instead offers an offbeat vision of the modern world as a fragile community of outsiders whose search for financial, emotional and sexual sustenance remains under the menacing eye of ubiquitous and frighteningly impersonal authorities.
Directed by Sébastien Lifshitz.
France 1996, video, color, 50 min. French with English subtitles
Print courtesy of the French Ministry
In an arrestingly filmed interview (with the questions omitted), Denis offers a spirited and insightful discussion of her films and career. Exploring her first few films in illuminating detail, she also explains her fascinating ideas about filmmaking itself—lighting, sound, editing—and about such other filmmakers as Renoir and Ozu.
Nenette and Boni Directed by Claire Denis.
With Grégoire Colin, Alice Houri, Vincent Gallo
France 1996, 35mm, color, 108 min. French with English subtitles
Print from Strand Releasing
Denis' marvelously nuanced portrait of youth and sibling bonds follows the intertwined lives of an estranged teenaged brother and sister living more or less on their own in working class Marseilles and brought together at crucial turning points in their lives. Rejecting the sentimental and ultimately condescending formulas of traditional coming-of-age stories, Denis is equally interested in conjuring the dream lives and fantasies of the siblings as understanding their relationship to the hard knocks world in which they find themselves. Featuring the instinctive and supple camerawork of Agnes Godard and an intoxicating original soundtrack by Tindersticks, Nenette and Boni is a richly sensual and rewarding film that pulls the viewer into the uniquely sensual and at times almost hallucinatory experience of adolescence.
Beau travail Directed by Claire Denis.
With Denis Lavant, Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin
France 1999, 35mm, color, 90 min. French with English subtitles
Print from New Yorker Films
Denis and her near-constant collaborator, screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, reimagine Melville’s Billy Budd as a tale of jealousy and homoerotic desire amongst a company of French Legionnaires in remote Djibouti. The beautiful sparseness and enigmatic quality of Beau travail is informed by Denis’ interest in contemporary choreography and her careful attention to the legionnaires' training and exercise, rituals that suggest both the cohesion of and the unspoken tensions within the unit. In a film of few words the soldiers' sculptural bodies become expressive markers of the ways in which belonging, tenderness and violence trouble contemporary masculinity.
Special Event Tickets $10
Conversation With Claire Denis and Jean-Michel Frodon
Friday November 7 at 7pm
Directed by Claire Denis, Appearing in Person
With Alice Houri, Grégoire Colin, Jessica Tharaud
France 1994, 35mm, color, 67 min. French with English subtitles
Print from ARTE
U.S. Go Home is the great unseen Claire Denis film. Denis' contribution to Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age-- a remarkable French television commission that invited nine different directors, including Olivier Assayas and Andre Techiné, to reflect upon their adolescence and the music that was important to them-- U.S. Go Home has been screened in this country only a handful of times. A quasi-autobiographical work inspired by the culture shock of Denis' return from Africa to the Parisian outskirts, U.S. Go Home uses the story of two young girls' reluctant visit to a dance party to explore the fugitive chemistry of social and sexual relationships.
Directed by Claire Denis, Appearing in Person
With Sophie Simon, Sarina Chan
US 1991, 35mm, b/w, 40 min.
Print from Pyramide
Denis’ only film shot in the U.S. tells the story of a young Parisian woman who travels to New York to reunite with her American boyfriend only to find he has fled, mysteriously leaving behind the key to his apartment. A wonderful homage to the vibrant early 1990s New York scene, Keep It For Yourself features original music by John Lurie and the first of many appearances by Denis favorite, Vincent Gallo.
Special Event Tickets $10
Conversation With Claire Denis and Jean-Michel Frodon
Saturday November 8 at 7pm
Friday Night (Vendredi soir)Directed by Claire Denis, Appearing in Person
With Valerie Lemercier, Vincent Lindon
France 2002, 35mm, color, 90 min. French with English subtitles
Print from Genius Products
Denis' poetic exploration of the pleasures and discontents of 21st century heterosexuality follows the nightlong odyssey shared by a woman and the hitchhiker who she spontaneously picks up during a Paris traffic jam. In signature Denis fashion Friday Night deliberately cultivates a rich ambiguity on its every level. Is the mood suffused with lust, ennui or menace, or some combination of the three? Are the two protagonists connecting and communicating or fundamentally alone with each other? The remarkable cinematography by Agnès Godard is equally paradoxical, both gauzy and crystalline. The sensual pleasure in surfaces and the attention to mood so important to Denis’ work come to the fore in Friday Night, alternately reflecting and refracting the film's gossamer plot and almost anonymous protagonists.
Trouble Every Day Directed by Claire Denis, Appearing in Person
With Vincent Gallo, Tricia Vessey, Béatrice Dalle
France 2001, 35mm, color, 101 min. French with English subtitles
Print from Wild Bunch
A hard-hitting mélange of science fiction, body horror and AIDS allegory, Trouble Every Day is perhaps Denis’ most underappreciated work. Although the film's apparent coldness and glimpses of carnal savagery immediately marked it as a controversial aberration in Denis' oeuvre, Trouble Every Day is perhaps best understood as an important, albeit darker, variation of the restless, lonely searching for connection between people that remains the central theme of Denis’ work. While the film centers upon the relationship between an American and French vampire, Denis’ real interest, is not in the trappings of genre, whether mad-doctor imaginings or bloodshed, but in the limits of love, sex and forgiveness.
L’intrus (The Intruder)Directed by Claire Denis.
With Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katia Golubeva
France/Korea 2004, 35mm, color, 121 min. French with English subtitles
Print from Genius Products
Perhaps Denis' most ambitious film, L’intrus is offered as a response to contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s book of the same name whose reflection on belonging and otherness was prompted by the author's recent heart transplant. While Nancy examines the experience of a corporeal intrusion by a stranger, Denis' film responds by juxtaposing north and south, reality and fantasy, female and male, violence and reverie in an elliptical story about a man wandering the globe in search of a replacement heart and the young man who may be his unacknowledged son.
Directed by Claire Denis.
With Michel Subor, Grégoire Colin, Katia Golubeva
France 2002, video, b/w, 10 min. French with English subtitles
Nancy is both a Northeastern French city (and hometown of Eric Rohmer) and the last name of Jean-Luc Nancy, the celebrated philosopher who has exerted a major influence on Denis’ recent work. A fascinating combination of direct interview and fiction, Denis’ short is her first attempt to grapple with Nancy’s ideas about intrusion and otherness and an excellent introduction to L’intrus.
Directed by Claire Denis.
With Alex Descas, Isaach de Bankolé, Solveig Dommartin
France 1990, video, color, 91 min. French with English subtitles
Print from Pathé International
In sharp contrast to the lush, exquisitely composed Chocolat, Denis' second film uses its rough edge handheld camera to explore the claustrophobic and fraught world of two black immigrant friends raising fighting cocks in a gritty Parisian suburb. A precursor to Beau Travail's study of uneasy male camaraderie No Fear, No Die carefully observes the subtly shifting dynamic between the two men-- wonderfully played by Denis’ favorite actors, Alex Descas and Isaach de Bankolé-- and the rituals and cruelties that define their world.
Directed by Claire Denis.
France 1991,
French with English subtitles
Print courtesy of the French Ministry
Denis’ contribution to a film dedicated to political prisoners is a haunting “music video” juxtaposing a melancholy Alain Souchon song about the loneliness and powerlessness of the immigrant with footage of two African men walking the streets of Belleville in Paris.
