Claire Denis: Cinema on the Margins

Beau Travail (Directed by Claire Denis)

Claire Denis was born in Paris in 1948. Her parents moved to Africa shortly after she was born, and she spent her formative years travelling with her family around France and Africa, where her father was employed as a civil servant, living in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, French Somaliland, and Senegal. Her childhood living in French colonial Africa would influence  her outlook and became a strong feature of her films, which deal with themes of colonialism and its consequences in Africa.

Her introduction to cinema came via King Vidor's film of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1956) and Satyajit Ray's classic Pather Panchali (1955), as well as American war pictures she saw as a youngster in Africa. Returning to complete her education in France at 14 years old, she moved with her mother and sister to a Parisian suburb. Denis began her career in filmmaking after completing an internship with Télé Niger, then formal study at film school in Paris. Denis went on to work as an assistant to New Wave directors Jacques Rivette and Robert Enrico after graduating in 1971. Her collaboration with Rivette resulted in a long-lasting relationship that culminated in the 1990 television documentary Jacques Rivette – Le Veilleur (Jacques Rivette – The Nightwatchman), which Denis co-directed with Serge Daney. Denis's early engagement with Rivette introduced her to other filmmakers, including Jean-François Stévinen, whose debut feature film, Passe-montagne (1978), had a significant effect on Denis.

Denis began her career as an assistant director to Costa-Gavras and later to other internationally renowned directors Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. Denis was heavily influenced by both Jarmusch and Wenders, particularly in her preference for minimal dialogue and her rejection of traditional modes of narration. Denis was also introduced to the work of American director John Cassavettes through Wenders and Jarmusch, whose powerful crime drama The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) starring Ben Gazzarra had a significant influence on her.

As with Wenders and Jarmusch's films, music plays a significant role in Denis's work incorporating popular songs into her work to startling effect. Denis considers listening to music to be a necessary component of the scriptwriting process. Beau Travail, for example, was co-written with John-Pol Fargeau to the sounds of Britton's opera Billy Budd which plays a central role in the film, while the band Tindersticks' music "totally nurtured" the script development for Nénette et Boni. Another key aspect of Denis’s working method is her use of frequent collaborators. Denis has worked with cinematographer Agnès Godard on many of her movies, while screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau has co-written several of her films. Denis also employs a rotating cast of performers, while her rehearsal techniques and character development are renowned for their unconventional nature. Rather than rehearsing the film's screenplay, Denis and Fargeau construct alternate scenarios to be utilised during rehearsals to promote spontaneity during production.

Denis's debut feature film, Chocolat (which Wenders assisted in financing), explored racial conflict and desire, set in Cameroon in the final days of French rule. Semi-autobiographical in nature it tells the story of the lone white family of Marc Dalens, the frequently-traveling regional administrator; his wife Aimee, who does her best to avoid boredom and loneliness with daily chores; and their young daughter France, who develops a friendship with the local servant boy Protee. However, the family's orderly world is challenged when an emergency landing of a plane filled with strangers occurs nearby, unleashing a flood of seething resentments, prejudices, and suppressed passions. The film is seen through the eyes of both child and adult France, as well as the family's houseboy Protée (Isaach De Bankolé), whose sombre presence arouses the governor's wife, Aimée's yearning. The picture moves at a leisurely pace, with very little dialogue. Instead, gestures and looks serve as the primary means of communication. The film is remarkable in its representation of the African terrain and the piercing incongruity of its French intruders. Chocolat gathered critical acclaim and she followed her debut feature with several other films including her most acclaimed work Beau Travail, loosely based on Herman Melville's 1888 novel Billy Budd and set in Djibouti, where the protagonists are soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.

As Claire Denis has managed to successfully carve a place for herself on the edge of cinema, so her heroes and heroines are outsiders, condemned to relocation, marginalisation, and exile, whether actual or metaphorical. This is a cinema of acute strangeness and alienation, ranging from the poetic to the harsh, into more surreal, dreamlike and oblique worlds from Chocolat to I Can't Sleep to Beau Travail. Hers has been a steady attempt to interrogate the conflicts between her characters' uncertain emotional states and the sensorial external world that surrounds and regularly overwhelms them.

The following excerpt is from an interview with Claire Denis from 2006 with Gavin Smith for Film Comment magazine during the promotion of her film The Intruder, the story of Louis Trebor, a man living alone with his dogs in the woods near the French-Swiss border. He has a heart condition, seeks a transplant on the black market in Korea, before traveling to Tahiti, where he lived in his youth, in the hope of connecting with a son he does not know.

As a director, do you see yourself as kind of a misfit?

I fit in my idea of cinema, sometimes there are connections. I know some people like me, and they help me to produce my films or distribute them, but I never ask them what they think about me. But me, I feel unfit. I don’t like to think I am violent and sometimes bad-tempered. I hate my day when I cannot share it with the crew and the actors, and I hate a situation where I am the only one to believe in a scene. I have to convince everyone. When I cannot, I feel very bad.

Are you conscious of making films about outsiders?

But when people ask me why are they about outsiders, I cannot answer the question because it seems like a political attitude. I told you when I was working with Makavejev, I was always ready to be inside, because I never felt inside. Makavejev told me to sleep with Otto Mühl and I wasn’t afraid because I was unreachable, not because I am a pretentious person but because I have a dreamy distance with reality, which is not a really good thing.

I think it’s very good for films.

But for life it is not.

Maybe not. I have always felt that your films were very difficult for me, maybe because I tend to be rational despite being drawn to the poetic or imaginative work. I look at a film and try to understand its mathematics. But that doesn’t work with your film.

As an audience, I do not ask any questions of the film. The film can lead me anywhere. I can go and see any film, a good or a bad one. In Saraband, when the young girl speaks for the first time about her father and there is this flash image of the father grabbing her. It’s a vision, probably not the vision of the girl, but it blew me away. I say this is the greatest thing I have seen this year. A real vision, a vision of violence, but something that doesn’t tell the exact truth, because it’s kind of hard to speak about the relations you have with your father. It feels like a kind of hidden consciousness. I am not able to do that. But I understand logic. I have been educated to be logical, so I know what logic is.

But you don’t choose it?

No, but I don’t reject it as something I don’t like. I’m the opposite: if I have a discussion with someone, I would not be very tolerant with someone who has no logic.

But when you watch a film?

I ask for nothing.

Do you feel torn between the need to tell a story and the desire to go for something more abstract? It seems anything you can do on a visual level to make the film abstract like a painting, you do.

But I do it in a very honest gesture. I think when the location is right for the story in a very logical way, it’s easy to film. If the location is beautiful but wrong, it doesn’t work. It is very painful to choose a location because it seems good-looking during pre-production then to realize it’s only good-looking. It is completely unfair to the story. Djibouti is very beautiful, but I would have never used Djibouti if it were not a territory chosen by the real Foreign Legion. It is very hot, very dry, and very spiritual place to train their guys. And I told the crew that the beauty is not the purpose for the film. You really have to forget this beauty. The work is elsewhere. When I shoot or choose a frame with Agnès, it’s never aesthetic, it’s always logical.

There is a very unusual shot in Beau travail, which must have been done with a very long lens, where you have the soldiers digging in the foreground and in the middle distance is the sea and then on the horizon there is sky and it’s all one plane. It’s like a Rothko painting.

The sound of the digging is mute because the wind blows it away. But it’s not a long lens. It’s a 50mm, but the heat and the dust makes a lot of smoke. The cliff and sea are in the distance, but with heat waves that kill the perspective.

That’s an example of what I meant about abstraction overwhelming narrative.

Well, I have to tell you, I could have made that shot last 30 minutes. For me it is the most comical shot in the movie. You see that landscape, those stones that are lava from the volcano. It’s 50 degrees [Celsius] and those 15 guys are digging solid rock. I did the film before 9/11, so at that moment I thought the Foreign Legion was of no use anymore. For me it was like Beckett. No, really. It had absolutely no aesthetic purpose. Of course when I got to the editing room, only then did I realize all the variations of blue and the mist, the waves, the heat waves, and the dust. It was staged almost.

Is abstraction in your films a device for getting us inside somebody’s head? I’m thinking of the traffic jam and driving scenes in Friday Night—it all becomes a kind of a blur and it’s there to keep us inside [Laure’s] mind.

It’s like a warning signal for her: maybe this guy is wrong for me.

And perhaps from the moment she falls asleep in the car, nothing we see really takes place. It’s all a fantasy or a dream.

Maybe, yes.

He gets out of the car, he walks away, she drives around for a while, then she sees him in a café. It’s unbelievable except in terms of dream logic.

I would say there is something, for someone who experienced the strike of ’95—Emmanuèle was inspired by those long strikes—a very strange thing happened. People meeting, falling in love, changing life. So, yes, it is the language of dream. And yet a moment like a strike creates a suspended moment. The reality suddenly changes. There was a subway strike 10 days ago in Paris. It was the end of winter and was suddenly very warm. Paris changed. People were not going to work, they were in cafés. It was something completely non-aggressive. People were smiling. But it only existed because of the strike, no subway, no buses. I was walking home and I felt something different, like something could happen. Emmanuèle was trying to convey that feeling. I play my part in it. I accentuate it even.

It’s interesting that you bring up suspension because that’s a consistent quality in your films—certainly from Beau travail on. This feeling of being outside time. Where that comes from and is it something you’re conscious of?

I am conscious of it in my real life also. For me a good day is when I dictate time and a bad day is when time dictates me. Days when I have to do something according to time are not very creative and generate a lot of anxiety. But when I can check the time—oh, I still have one hour to do this—it’s always perfect. I think I kind of give that to the characters in the films. They want be free of order. Logic is like a watch. It doesn’t work so much with me. I try to free characters from that. Like the young man in Nénette et Boni works, but the dead of night belongs to him, and when Nénette intrudes on his life, the time becomes different. Because she is pregnant, she has her own time. It completely interrupts his dreamtime.

Why do you begin The Intruder with the main character’s son? Actually, not even his son, but the son’s wife?

[Originally] the first scene in the script was like a monologue of a son who was unemployed, as if he was writing to his father, complaining about his lack of love and his selfishness and pleading with him to be a father. It also explained a little bit about his father’s strange past. We had no time to shoot that scene because Grégoire had to accept another a film and was never able to come back. So it was supposed to begin with the son.

And then shift very radically to be being about the father.

And then the forest. Instead I put in the scene at the border with his wife. And in the original script, it did not end with Beatrice, it ended in the forest—with no people and no snow. As if it was the monologue of the son finishing. As if the whole film was contained in that monologue.

It must have been hard coping after your producer, Humbert Balsan, committed suicide before The Intruder was released in France.

It’d never happened to me that a producer, and a friend, hung himself in his office a month and half before a film is released. I never experienced that before, and I wish I hadn’t. The bank stopped everything. I couldn’t get any more prints made. I had to solve everything. It was an ordeal. But it’s more than that: it’s a pessimistic conclusion to all those years when Humbert surfed on the wave of difficulties. He was so brave, he liked adventure. I knew him from the time when he worked with Bresson [as an actor on Lancelot du Lac], and it was always a running joke—when are we going to work together?