-
The Regis Dialogue and Retrospective program is made possible by generous support from Regis Foundation. Additional support provided by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Institut Francois, and Unifrance.
Part of Dialogues & Film Retrospectives
Claire Denis, I Can’t Sleep, 1994.
Claire Denis is a French filmmaker and writer. Her breakthrough feature film, Chocolat (1988) was met with high praise and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Denis grew up in French colonial Africa, and many of her films delve deeply into that subject matter (US Go Home, 1994; Nénette et Boni, 1996; Beau Travail, 1999; and White Material, 2009). Denis’s films Beau Travail (1999), Trouble Every Day (2001), and 35 Shots of Rum (2008) are regarded as some of her most poignant works. Denis is joined by critic Eric Hynes for a reflection on her prolific career. Recorded in 2012.
Claire Denis Dialogue with Eric Hynes
2012 | 1:44:35Claire Denis joins writer and critic Eric Hynes in a discussion of her creative process, influences, and the films she's made over the course of some 25 years.
Program
Program
To meet Claire Denis is to encounter a moviemaker in exquisite harmony with her films. Her naturally regal bearing carries and transmits an equally natural earthiness (which you can hear in her rough laughter), just as her becalmed camera is never less than ravenous for earth, sky, wind, water, and above all, humanity. The immediate intimacy reflected in Claire’s smile is there in the family meal in 35 Shots of Rum; her nomadic sensibility is manifested in the restless transcontinental movement of The Intruder; her curiosity and focus (she always speaks with utmost concision) are fully apparent in her precise rendering of interior unreality in the face of deteriorating exterior circumstances in White Material.
It has been heartening to witness Claire’s artistic progression across the years, and to consider the vast amount of territory, physical and spiritual, that she’s covered within each individual film and throughout her entire oeuvre. Her body of work plays in the imagination as a wonderfully varied and unpredictable universe of behaviors, environments and emotional and visual textures, not unlike the impression left by Bruegel’s canvases. Every film appears to be the result of an exploratory process, one that creates a special logic of character and place, along with one constant: nothing in humanity is fixed. Grace and roughness and tenderness and brutality and patience and impatience are coexistent.
There are passages in Claire’s work unlike anything else in movies, such as the enchanted Paris of 35 Shots of Rum, which breathes with a warm, lived-in beauty. Trouble Every Day is the most delicately concentrated rendering of atavism imaginable. Beau travail goes so deep into the world of male camaraderie and order that it appears to have been generated from the inside out, projected from the psyches of Denis Lavant’s Galoup and Michel Subor’s Commander Forestier onto the sun-drenched landscapes of Djibouti. With The Intruder and White Material, she finds a near abstract, incantatory power that merges in the mind with that of Faulkner.
In 2009, we ran an end-of-decade section in Film Comment, and when it came time for me to name my “Film Person of the Decade,” there didn’t seem to be any other choice. To know Claire Denis’ work over the last two decades has been a privilege. Artists this attuned to the rhythms of existence come along all too rarely.
—Kent Jones
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)