Claire Denis: Two Continents, One Unspoken World
Claire Denis and Alex Descas On The Set Of “35 Rhums”
An androgynously dressed, short-haired, older French woman, appears behind a mounted camera yelling cut. Claire Denis is on the set of her newest film High Life starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and Andre 3000 which takes place in outer space. A stark difference from her first feature film Chocolat which was shot on location in Africa where Denis grew up. Her early childhood years spent in Africa have played a major role in her perspective of life and her art. Denis was born April 21st, 1946, in Paris, France, but she spent most of her childhood living in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, French Somaliland, and Senegal where her father worked as a civil servant. Moving back to France when she was 14 she described it as otherworldly and it was there she majored in economics and hated it. She decided to study at the famous French film school IDHEC and her love of film grew from there. Denis has made many award-winning short films, documentaries, and feature films over her long career. Outside of being a filmmaker she is also a professor in France, Switzerland, and has online masterclasses.
Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) in “Beau Travail”
The most striking thing about Claire Denis’s work is how personal, raw, and insanely human her films are. Denis also explores themes of postcolonialism, regret, modern alienation, and the multitude of complexities between love and sex within her films. Mostly filmed on location with real-life playing out in her carefully advised shots you immediately know you’ve been transported somewhere in a different time and world and can’t look away. Abundantly her films are set on location in Africa where she grew up, Judith Mayne the author of the book “Claire Denis” states that, “Denis’s representations of Africa engage with basic questions of how the cinema functions in relationship to what is familiar and what is strange, and in relationship to the pleasures and dangers of looking.” When watching her films you feel like a voyeur like James Stewart in Rear Window (1954). You see characters at their most vulnerable or hear in on their deep secrets. But first by describing France and Africa’s relation to each other helps to understand the relationship Denis has with the two countries.
Denis is an international filmmaker with a reach into different continents and countries but most of her work is distributed from France and most critics call her a French contemporary filmmaker. France is the birthplace of cinema with La Cinémathèque Française and the Lumière brothers in the late 1890s and it was there the race of cinema began with Edison in the States and other filmmakers/entrepreneurs around the world. France also at this time had their hands dirty in Africa where for the past 60 years they had been colonizing West African countries.
Isaach De Bankolé in “Chocolat”
Her films Chocolat and Beau Travail specifically take place in French-occupied territories and follow the lives of French occupants. Critic John Orr writes, “as befits a French-West African woman with deep experience of two contrasting continents, all chart in different ways the constant presence of the Other in the fabric of the contemporary world.” France’s political and militaristic handling of Africa is a common theme and point of conflict throughout her work. Claire Denis is rather unique because of her childhood experience of innocence, naivety, and guilt of living in Africa as a french white woman and she translates these feelings onto film. Her African home now plays a vital character and backdrop for most of her films. France has occupied Africa since the 17th century but large colonialism attempts began in the 1830s by the Ottoman Algiers. France’s main objective in Africa was to control the people, abolish the African way of life, and convert the continent to Christianity. “Although formal French rule in Africa had ended by 1962, the ties it forged continue to shape relations between France and its former colonial territories throughout the continent.” For two centuries France claimed large parts of Africa as their own and to this day 21 African countries’ official language is French.
France's strict hold on the African countries meant filmmaking was typically banned. This meant that African filmmakers had to go to Paris to shoot their films, that's what happened in 1957, “A group consisting of Paulin Vieyra, Jacques Melokano, Mamadou Sarra and Jarlstan (the cameraman) produced what is probably the first film ever made by Africans. Called Afrique sur Seine (Africa on the Seine).” Because Africans weren’t allowed to film much of the world hasn’t been able to see large parts of Africa and African life. Not long after Ousmane Sembène came into the film scene and as the “father of African cinema” helped show the world Africa and its fantastic stories.
Aimée Dalens (Giulia Boschi) and Protée (Isaach De Bankolé) in “Chocolat”
That's the end of the history lesson now diving into her filmography starting with her first feature film Chocolat released in 1988 (not to be confused with the 2000 film starring Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche) which gained her recognition and a nomination for best feature film at Cannes that year. Major themes within the film deal with post-colonization, white privilege, and guilt. The film was shot on location in Cameroon, a place Denis used to live as a child. Denis has said of Chocolat, “I think I had a desire to express a certain guilt I felt as a child raised in a colonial world.” Chocolat follows the story of a white woman named France who returns to her childhood home in Africa and reflects on a complicated friendship with her family’s servant, Protée, in 1960 which was leading up to the country’s independence. The story centers around France’s arrogance to the racial and social tensions of the world around her, thus clearly showing the white privilege France has. Many people believe this film to be autobiographical of Claire Denis’s life but she insists it is not. A key difference being as Denis says, “My parents would certainly not have had someone serve them meals. I wasn’t raised like that.”
Denis shines Africa in a new breathtaking and honest light, one that is bustling by day in the hot sun and restless at night with howling hyenas. The lone house that is the central setting of the film and continuously cleaned by the head houseboy, Protee, is a dot in the wide expanse of Western Africa. The young girl, France, is with Protee almost at all times. Protee is an interesting quiet main character in which many scenes we see France watching him from afar doing his chores. Later in the film when the house is warmed with unexpected guests and more than one of the guests are bluntly racist in front of him and slowly see him change. “It is a movie about the rules and conventions of a racist society and how two intelligent adults, one black, one white, use their mutual sexual attraction as a battleground on which, very subtly, to taunt each other.” There is also an unspoken connection between France’s mother and Protee. With the husband away on expeditions and works for weeks, Protee is the only man really around the house. And the mother stays at home doing some chores, relaxing, and spending time with France. France can’t be any older than 10 years old running around Cameroon with Protee. France is but an observer we see the world through and meet the other characters. Denis’s films usually have this aura of voyeurism and peeking in on what people don’t want to be seen.
Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin) and the Men Hugging in “Beau Travail”
Another well-known film of Denis’s is Beau Travail (1999) which follows French Legionnaires in a sleepy part of Africa. “Beau travail shares much with Denis’s previous work, for the observation of masculinity and the complex relationship between France and Africa.” We follow the troop of men going through remedial activities like doing dishes, military exercises, and playing cards which is just a backdrop to the main story of jealousy and its destructive nature. The amount of muscles and testosterone present is kept at bay by Galoup’s narration of his years in the service. Galoup is a French Legion sergeant and becomes jealous of the recruit, Sentain who receives more attention from the superior officer. Galoup’s jealousy leads to both his own and Sentain’s demise. The film has very little dialogue except for it from Galoup’s narration and perspective of his experiences in the service which involves his existential questions and his love and admiration for his Corporal.
The film doesn’t shy away from the homosexual nature of the setting the men are in. “Denis loosely riffs on Melville’s novella, Billy Budd, Sailor, to create an astonishingly muscular tale of repressed homosexuality and troubled fixation.” Soldiers relax in the sea or do group shirtless stretches and practice military maneuvers which involve smacking each other into an intense hug multiple times. These repressed feelings, the untouchable, the violence that covers up the need for touch throughout Beau Travail plays well with the lack of dialogue and makes the ambiguous ending even more frustrating.
Monte (Robert Pattinson) Carrying his Daughter (Scarlett Lindsey) in “High Life”
Behind the camera is just as interesting as what’s in front of it when on set with Claire Denis. Her unique perspective of humanity is what captivates her hand-picked actors and crew. Moving to her most recent film High Life (2018) starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and Andre 3000, a hand-picked cast by Denis herself. They met all together in a hotel and Denis immediately fell in love with them and felt they were a perfect fit. This is how Denis casts almost all of her films. She has a very raw and gut reaction to life and her filmmaking and believes in viewing the world this way because it’s what’s true and honest. High Life is her first English debuted film and seems at first different from her other work but is still clearly a Claire Denis film. High Life follows convicts sent to space to harvest energy from a black hole and centers around Pattinson’s character and his daughter. The catch being the ship’s doctor is using the others for her sexual experiments in hope of making a baby and she’s a criminal too. The film is not for the faint of heart as it has multiple scenes of violent rape and other disturbing moments. Denis was praised by critics for her wild, intense, space psychological thriller but audiences generally were not a fan. For example, the critic Richard Brody was not a fan for stale storytelling reasons, “She shows little interest in how things happen, in the incidental aspects of the events she depicts; she wants her points to be made without the distractions and loose ends that make for the fullness and the ambiguity of experience.” From West Africa to a black hole her ambiguous films are still discussed, debated, and written about and she has no plans on stopping anytime soon.
Critics often call Denis an elliptical filmmaker. She will shock you and leave certain parts out of her films to allow you to fill in the gap. She puts a lot of trust into her audience that they can follow along with a nonlinear storyline and the metaphors throughout her films. A true definition of auteur and contemporary and even at the age of 74 is as fresh, shocking, and even agonizing with her films. Exploring the depths of our subconscious needs and wants which we seldom want to confront ourselves is where Denis loves to live and showcase.
Works Cited
Aldam, Rob. “Blu-Ray Review: Beau Travail.” Backseat Mafia, 19 Sept. 2020, www.backseatmafia.com/blu-ray-review-beau-travail/. Accessed 25 April 2021.
Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis, performances by Denis Lavant, Grégoire Colin, and Michel Subor. La Sept-Arte, Pathé Télévision, et al, 1999.
Brody, Richard, and Alice Gregory. “‘High Life," Reviewed: Claire Denis's Disappointing Journey Into Space.” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/high-life-reviewed-claire-deniss-disa pointing-journey-into-space. Accessed 25 April 2021.
Chocolat. Directed by Claire Denis, performances by Isaach de Bankolé, Giulia Boschi, and Cécile Ducasse. Caroline Productions, Cerito Films, et al, 1988.
Ebert, Roger. “Chocolat Movie Review & Film Summary (1989): Roger Ebert.” Movie Review & Film Summary (1989) | Roger Ebert, Alain Belmondo, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/chocolat-1989. Accessed 25 April 2021.
“French Colonial Rule - African Studies.” Oxford Bibliographies. 25 February 2016, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846733/obo 9780199846733-0029.xml#:~:text=The%20French%20presence%20in%20Afric ,Tunisia%20and%20Morocco%20in%20the. Accessed 25 April 2021.
Gregory, Alice, et al. “The Fearless Cinema of Claire Denis.” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/the-fearless-cinema-of-claire-denis. Accessed 25 April 2021.
High Life. Directed by Claire Denis, performance by Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, and André 3000. Alcatraz Films, Andrew Lauren Productions, et al, 2018.
Judith Mayne. Claire Denis. University of Illinois Press, 2005. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=709939&site= ds-livescope=site. Accessed 25 April 2021.
Orr, John, et al. Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet. Senses of Cinema, 15 Dec. 2010, www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/book-reviews/claire_denis/. Accessed 25 April 2021.
Rouch, Jean. “The Awakening African Cinema”. The Unesco Courier. March 1962. pp.11-15
Vecchio, Marjorie. The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border. I.B Tauris & Co. Ltd, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.