Claire Denis

Denis was born in Paris, but raised in colonial French Africa, where her father was a civil servant, living in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, French Somaliland, and Senegal.[5] Her childhood spent living in West Africa with her parents and her younger sister colored her perspective on certain political issues. It has been a strong influence on her films, which have dealt with colonialism and post-colonialism in Africa.[6] Her father moved with the family every two years because he wanted the children to learn about geography.

Growing up in West Africa, Denis used to watch the old and damaged copies of war films sent from the United States. As an adolescent she loved to read. Completing the required material while in school, at night she would sneak her mother's detective stories to read.[7] When Denis was 14, she moved with her mother and sister to a Parisian suburb in France, a country she hardly knew.[8] Her parents wanted their children to finish their education in France.

Denis initially studied economics, but, she has said, "It was completely suicidal. Everything pissed me off."[7] She studied at the IDHEC, the French film school, with her husband's encouragement. He told her she needed to figure out what she wanted to do.[7] She graduated from the IDHEC and since 2002 has been a professor of film at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.[9]

Her feature film directorial debut Chocolat (1988), a semi-autobiographical meditation on African colonialism, won her critical acclaim. It was selected for the Cannes Film Festival and praised by critics and audiences as a remarkable first film.

With films such as US Go Home (1994), Nénette et Boni (1996), Beau Travail (1999),[10] set in Africa; Trouble Every Day (2001), and Vendredi soir (2002), she established a reputation as a filmmaker who "has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France."[10] She returned to Africa with White Material (2009), set in an unidentified country during a civil war.

Denis is a highly collaborative filmmaker, saying in an interview, "the film becomes a relationship...and that is what's important, the relationship."[11] The importance of collaboration is seen throughout her body of work. She often recasts actors in multiple films, most notably Alex Descas, who has worked with Denis 11 times from 1990 to 2017, and Isaach de Bankolé who appeared in three of her films from 1988 to 2009. Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Juliette Binoche and Grégoire Colin have also appeared in multiple Denis films. She often collaborates with screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, composer Stuart Staples, and cinematographer Agnès Godard, whom she met in the 1970s at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques.[11] When asked about her screenwriting process, Denis said, "I often realize I have Isaach or Grégoire or someone else in mind" when writing scenes. She has also said that usually she "hold[s] no auditions" for casting her films.[11]

Her collaboration goes beyond her own films, as she has appeared in other directors' films, such as Laetitia Masson's En avoir (1995) and Tonie Marshall's Vénus beauté (1999). She shares screenwriting credit with Yousry Nasrallah for his film El Medina (2000).[12] She also worked as an assistant director with Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), and with Jim Jarmusch on Down by Law (1986).

In 2005, she was a member of the jury at the 27th Moscow International Film Festival.[13] In 2011, she was a member of the jury at the Deauville American Film Festival.

Her 2013 film Bastards was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.[14] Also that year, she was awarded Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award at the Stockholm Film Festival.

Denis announced in 2015 that she was partnering with Zadie Smith for her English-language debut film, High Life. Smith eventually left the project, causing a delay in filming. Denis went on to work on Let the Sunshine In, which starred Juliette Binoche and was released in 2017.

In 2018 Denis completed and released High Life, her first English-language feature film, with Robert Pattinson cast as the lead.[15] The film premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It was later given a limited release in the U.S. by American indie distributors A24. It was positively reviewed by many notable critics.[16][17]

Most of Denis's oeuvre uses location work rather than studio work. She sometimes places her actors as if they were positioned for still photography. She uses longer takes with a stationary camera and frames things in long shot, resulting in fewer close ups. But Denis's cinematic and topical focus always remains relentlessly on her protagonists' faces and bodies. The subject's body in space, and how the particular terrain, weather, and color of the landscape influence and interact with the human subjects of her films maintains cinematic dominance.

Tim Palmer explores Denis's work as a self-declared formalist and brilliant film stylist per se, an approach Denis has declared many times in interview to be as much about sounds, textures, colors and compositions as broader thematic concerns or social commitments.[18]

According to the Australian James Phillips, when making her films, Denis rejects the marketable conventions of Hollywood cinema and frees the viewers of her films from the expectations of clichés.[19]

Denis combines history with personal history, giving her films an autobiographical element.[20] This superimposition of the personal with the historical allows her films to be described as auteur cinema.[21] She has worked in many genres, from horror (Trouble Every Day, 2001) to romance and drama (Friday Night, 2002).[22] While critics have noted recurring themes in her films, Denis says she has no coherent vision of her career "trajectory".[23]

Denis chooses the titles of her films carefully. Noëlle Rouxel-Cubberly argues that titles are intended to force the viewer to rethink a film's imagery and Denis uses them cleverly to describe the raw reality of her films. For example, the title of Chocolat (1988) simultaneously refers to a racist term used during the period of the film, the cocoa exportation from Africa to Europe through a slave system, and the 1950s French expression "être chocolat", meaning "to be cheated."[24]

Denis is also known for "shooting fast, editing slowly". In general, she does a few takes on set and spends most of her time in the editing room, creating the film there. This post-production process often involves rearranging scenes out of the order in the script. For example, she placed the dance in Beau Travail (1999) at the end of the film though it was not at the end of the script. Of this process, Denis has said, "I'm always insecure when I'm making a film. I have doubts about myself but rarely about the actors."[25]

• Michael Omasta, Isabella Reicher (Ed.), Claire Denis. Trouble Every Day, FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-901644-15-6
• Levilson Reis, "An 'other' scene, an 'other' point of view: France's colonial family romance, Protée's postcolonial fantasy, and Claire Denis' 'screen' memories." Studies in European Cinema, vol. 10, nos. 2–3, 2013, pp. 119–131. DOI: 10.1386/seci.10.2-3.119_1.
• "L'intrus: An Interview with Claire Denis" by Damon Smith (Senses of Cinema).
• "Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis" by Darren Hughes (Senses of Cinema).
• "Great Directors: Claire Denis" by Samantha Dinning (Senses of Cinema).
• Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis, 2004, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York.
• Judith Mayne, Claire Denis, 2005, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.
• Spectacularly Intimate: An Interview with Claire Denis, by Kevin Lee, (MUBI).
• Marcelline Block, Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, 2008, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne.
• James Phillips, Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema, 2008, Stanford University Press, Stanford.
• "Feeling and form in the films of Claire Denis" by Ian Murphy (Jump Cut)
• "Moving Toward the Unknown Other: An Interview with Claire Denis" by Megan Ratner (Cineaste)
• Claire Denis's "Post-colonial" Films and Desiring Bodies by Susan Hayward (L'Esprit Créateur)
• 'Enfolding Surfaces, Spaces and Materials: Claire Denis' Neo-Baroque Textures of Sensation' by Saige Walton (Screening the Past)
• "Gestures of Intimacy: Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep" by Saige Walton (Senses of Cinema)
• "White Material" by Marcin Wisniewski (Senses of Cinema)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Claire Denis.

• Claire Denis at IMDb
• Back to Africa: An Interview with Claire Denis, MUBI
• Claire Denis. Faculty page at European Graduate School (Biography, filmography, photos and video lectures)
• Claire Denis, a Reverse Shot symposium
• Claire Denis, an interview for The New York Times by Charlotte Druckman
• No Fear: The Films of Claire Denis on the IFC Center website
• Moving Toward the Unknown Other: An Interview with Claire Denis by Megan Ratner
• "Feeling and form in the films of Claire Denis" by Ian Murphy (Jump Cut essay)
• The films of Claire Denis, Hell Is For Hyphenates, 30 September 2014