Conversation with Fronza Woods

Fronza

In the context of the program ‘Breaking Sacred Ground’, part of Courtisane Festival 2019 (3 – 7 APRIL 2019). Curated by Stoffel Debuysere.

“I like films about real people. I am inspired by almost everything but especially by struggle. I am interested in people who take on a challenge, no matter how great or small, and come to terms with it. What inspires me are people who don’t sit on life’s rump but have the courage, energy, and audacity not only to grab it by the horns, but to steer it as well.”

Fronza Woods was born, raised and educated in Detroit. She began her professional life as a junior copywriter at a small Detroit advertising agency. In 1967, she moved to New York, where she continued to work in advertising. Then, at a time when television was opening up to people of colour, she went to work for ABC news, before learning to craft her own films at the Women’s Interart Center under the aegis of Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. Killing Time, an offbeat, wryly humorous look at the dilemma of a suicidal woman unable to find the right outfit to die in, examines the personal habits, socialization, and complexities of life that keep us going. When the film recently screened, Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker: “very simply, one of the best short films that I’ve ever seen,” comparing it favorably to Chantal Akerman’s first film Saute Ma Ville. In Fannie’s Film, a 65­-year­-old cleaning woman for a professional dancers’ exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. The first in an unaccomplished series of portraits dedicated to “invisible women”, Fannie’s Film offers “a brutal, brilliant allegory for women and film” (Manohla Dargis, The New York Times). In addition to making her own films, Woods has worked as camerawoman on numerous independent films, was assistant sound engineer on John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet (1984) and a cast member in Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (1985), and taught basic filmmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where she also created and curated an outreach film programme for the city’s black community. She now resides in the southwest of France.

(portrait (c) Michiel Devijver)

Courtisane 2019: Fronza Woods from Courtisane Festival on Vimeo.

Michel Khleifi : Fertile Memory / Mémoire Fertile

untitled

Publication compiled on the occasion of a retrospective film programme dedicated to Michel Khleifi, organized by CINEMATEK and Courtisane (Brussels, 26 September – 05 November 2019).

“What we see on the screen, or in any picture representing the solidity of Palestinians in the interior, is only that, a utopian image making possible a connection between Palestinian individuals and Palestinian land.”

It’s been almost four decades since Edward Said wrote this passage on Michel Khleifi’s first film, Sadh-dhakira al khisba (Fertile Memory, 1980), but it has lost none of its expressive force. For Said, the film managed, with astonishing precision and beauty, to call up the memory of his own mother and all those who have had their land seized by the Israeli state. In seeing the moment when one of the women portrayed sets foot on her own land that has been “repossessed” by Israelis, but that she stubbornly refuses to sell, Said was reminded of how separated he was from the experience of an interior that he could himself not inhabit. “At once inside and outside our world” was how he described the experience of exile, one that Michel Khleifi himself is not unfamiliar with. In September 1970, the month that would become infamous as “Black September”, Khleifi left the city of Nazareth in Galilee and found refuge in Brussels, where he devoted himself to the art of cinema. It was only a decade later that he returned to the place of his birth to shoot Fertile Memory, the first full-length film ever to be shot by a Palestinian filmmaker within the disputed West Bank “Green Line”.

Fertile Memory portrays the lives of two women bearing the weight of a double occupation: both the burden of Israeli domination and the restrictions of a patriarchal society. By showing the lived contra- dictions of life under occupation, Khleifi’s film marked an important shift in the history of Palestinian cinema, one that he would explore further in his subsequent work. In Urs al-Jalil (Wedding in Galilee, 1987), which was awarded the International Critics Prize at Cannes, the guests at a wedding are contorted between the modern military power of the Israeli occupant and the archaic patriarchal authority of the local government. In Nashidu alhajar (Canticle of the Stones, 1990), the love that is refound by a couple, since their forced separation during the war of 1967, is contrasted with the violence raging on the streets of Jerusalem during the first Intifada. In these and subsequent films, Khleifi, time and again, shifted the dividing lines between reality and fiction, between document and narration, in order to give form to the complexity of a world that is all too often reduced to commonplaces and newspeak.

The films by Michel Khleifi inevitably bear the traces of the turbulent times that Palestine-Israel has gone through in the past decades. Fertile Memory was finished just before the Lebanon war broke out; Wedding in Galilee was released shortly before the beginning of the First Intifada; Route 181 (2003), in which Khleifi and Eyal Sivan trace the demarcation line put forward by the UN in 1948, was made right after the outbreak of the Second Intifada, which led to the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Today, violence is once again on the rise and a solution seems to be further away than ever. As the continuity of land increasingly disappears from the lives of Palestinians, and narratives claiming the inevitability and irreversibility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gain ever more traction, could Michel Khleifi’s “utopian images” still have something to say?

Stoffel Debuysere

Publication available via Courtisane bookshop

Of Sea and Soil: The Cinema of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogawa Shinsuke

Tsuchogawa

Publication compiled and published on the occasion of the film programmes dedicated to Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Pro (CINEMATEK Brussels, 1 April – 5 May 2019) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki (Courtisane Festival Ghent, 3 – 7 April 2019). Both programmes, initiated by Courtisane, would not have been possible without the dedication of Ricardo Matos Cabo.

Ogawa Shinsuke (1935-1992) and Tsuchimoto Noriaki (1928-2008) are considered as the two towering pillars of Japanese documentary film. Both filmmakers forged parallel trajectories through the tumultuous landscape of postwar Japan, during which they developed extraordinary forms of committed cinema which remain unequalled in their dedication and perseverance.

Ogawa and Tsuchimoto were among a number of crucial postwar Japanese filmmakers who emerged from Iwanami Productions, a studio run by the Iwanami publishing house that mostly produced educational and PR films. Heated discussions on cinema and politics amongst these filmmakers led to the creation of an informal group they called the “Ao no kai”, or “Blue Group”. When the group dissolved, Ogawa and Tsuchimoto each went on their own way to make their first important independent films, which took sides with the student protest movement in Japan in the mid to late 1960s.

In the years that followed, their filmmaking approach underwent a profound transformation, which can be described as a movement from “outside” to “inside”. This inward shift, which evolved towards a full implication in the struggles of the people they filmed, reached its most refined and profound development in the Minamata and Sanrizuka Series. While Tsuchimoto committed himself to document the disastrous consequences of the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Ogawa recorded with great diligence the struggle by farmers and student protesters to prevent the construction of the Narita International Airport in Sanrizuka.

After the waning of the Sanrizuka protests, Ogawa and his colleagues of Ogawa Productions devoted themselves to an equally ambitious project, relocating to Yamagata Prefecture and beginning a series of films focusing on the rural village of Magino. Living and working with the farmers they filmed, the collective created a unique portrait of a culture and a way of life that are rarely depicted. From his side, Tsuchimoto – and his crew – continued to painstakingly document the effects of the Minamata tragedy on the life of the local fishing communities, while also redirecting their focus towards the dangers of nuclear power and the “theft of the sea” perpetrated by giant business conglomerates.

With the benefit of hindsight, the films of Ogawa and Tsuchimoto reveal themselves as monumental works in progress which remain open to incessant processes of debate and development. They made films that convey a material understanding of the world they document, films not on a subject, but with the subject. The astonishing commitment and persistence invested in their work continues to raise timely and pertinent questions about the responsibility, politics and ethics of documentary
filmmaking in the face of injustice and adversity. In that way, their films still accomplish what they were meant to do in the first place: to cultivate shared spaces of collective thought and struggle.

This publication aims to trace the trajectories of Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki, who film critic Hasumi Shigehiko respectively called “the filmmaker of the soil” and “the filmmaker of the sea”. The publication has taken the form of a scrapbook which assembles a patchwork of writings, quotes and interviews that we were able to track down and translate, with the help of numerous other “amateurs” who admire and cherish the work of these two filmmakers.

In all its modesty, we dearly hope that this body of texts, most of which are available here for the very first time in English, can serve as a stepping stone to a wider recognition and appreciation of these unique and singular practices of filmmaking which never cease to inspire and actuate.

Stoffel Debuysere, Courtisane
Elias Grootaers, Sabzian

Publication available via Courtisane bookshop

Conversation with Valeska Grisebach & Syuleyman Alilov Letifov

grisebach

In the context of a retrospective program dedicated to the work of Valeska Grisebach (15 FEBRUARY – 27 FEBRUARY 2019, Brussels), after a screening of ‘Western’ (2017) on 20 February. An initiative of CINEMATEK and Courtisane, in collaboration with KASK cinésessies, KASKcinema, STUK & Goethe-Institut.

“I’ve never set out to make a film with a story in mind. Instead, there’s always a relatively abstract theme that I approach through a process of highly associative, personal research. For me, this act of going out and seeking contact is a fundamental part of writing and shooting. For me, it’s important to use documentary methods at every stage, because that’s how you let the unexpected in: the things you can’t make up.”

After the critically acclaimed relationship drama Sehnsucht, which was awarded the Prix Cinédécouvertes by Cinematek in 2006, Valeska Grisebach needed no less than eleven years to finish a new film. But Western (2017) was more than worth the wait: rarely has a film evoked the contours and challenges of today’s Europe so poignantly. Just as her previous work, Grisebach’s third feature-length film – again with the renowned Bernhard Keller behind the camera – is the result of an extensive research process, in which she patiently searches for suitable locations and a cast of non-professional actors. For this film she found Petrelik, a hamlet in the south of Bulgaria that symbolizes the myth of the “Wild East”, the perfect location to base her own interpretation of the western genre. Inspired by the ambivalent heroic figures in classical genre practices such as Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), the duelling neo-cowboys in Western are embodied by a group of German construction workers who, in their confrontation with the foreign, waver between curiosity and paranoia, between a desire towards communality and a fear of the unknown. That’s how Grisebach’s self-proclaimed “dance with the western” touches on a number of issues that are central to the European debate today, including the “gold rush” to the East, a theme that also resounds throughout another film from the so-called Berliner Schule: Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), on which it’s no coincidence that Grisebach collaborated as a script consultant. This retrospective programme, which also includes a hand-picked selection of films placed in dialogue with her own, illustrates how her work, ever since her graduation project Mein Stern (2001), balances between construction and improvisation, between the exploration of the real and the invention of fiction. A balancing act that Valeska Grisebach knows how to handle like no other.

ARTIST IN FOCUS: Claire Denis

23 March – 11 May 2019, CINEMATEK, Brussels. In collaboration with Courtisane, curated by Stoffel Debuysere & Céline Brouwez.

“We think ourselves in love / we think ourselves fiercely rooted
still it always comes / the time of unraveled ties”
— Jean-Louis Murat, Le Lien Défait

This song by Jean-Louis Murat is not only the beating heart of one of the many unforgettable scenes in Claire Denis’s work, it also alludes to one of the themes that’s dear to her : the fragility of human relationships — the filiation between brother and sister in Nénette and Boni, or father and daughter in 35 Shots of Rum, but also the passionate liaison between two fleeting lovers in Friday Night or the yearning for another portrayed as all-devouring hunger in Trouble Every Day. Over the course of thirty years, Denis has built up an idiosyncratic oeuvre that evokes a world in which amorous or familial relationships are never self-evident and in which characters relate to each other in a continuous game of attraction and rejection.

It is the attentive observation of characters who encounter each other through experiences of desire, pleasure, pain or fear that is central to Denis’s cinema. She once remarked, “capturing characters that are embodied by actors on film is what really interests me.” Hence the many dance scenes that run like a red thread through her films: just think of the aforementioned performance scene from I Can’t Sleep, but also the equally phenomenal dance scenes from Beau Travail or 35 Shots of Rum. They are all pulsating moments that are exemplary of the enormous emotional expressiveness that she knows how to extract from the patient and intuitive observation of moving bodies that are trying to position themselves in an environment where they do not always belong.

It’s no coincidence that music is a leading factor in Denis’s films: she regards music as an “ally” who has accompanied her life and work since France became her home, after having spent her first thirteen years with her parents in various colonial outposts in Africa. That childhood experience resonates strongly in her debut Chocolat and White Material, which paint a disconcerting image of the injuries and aftermath of French colonialism in Africa. But the concern for the experience of displacement and the relation to alterity can also be felt in the literary sources of inspiration that resonate in her films, ranging from Frantz Fanon’s study of the psychological effects of colonization to William Faulkner’s portrayal of the brutality of patriarchal and racial oppression.

“The desire to make a film is the desire to see others,” Claire Denis once said. Whether the focus is on a corps of the French foreign legion in Djibouti (Beau Travail), migrant communities in the margins of Paris (I Can’t Sleep), or, more recently, a prison ship adrift in another solar system (High Life), time and time again, Claire Denis’s films are characterized by a searching, sensing sensitivity towards worlds that are not necessarily her own. A sensitivity that she gladly shares with faithful long-term companions such as cinematographer Agnes Godard, co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau, editor Nelly Quettier, composer Stuart A. Staples and actors such as Alex Descas, Grégoire Colin, Vincent Gallo or Béatrice Dalle. For Claire Denis filmmaking never implies less than “entering into a relationship”, in an intimate search for the ties that bind, for a connection in wonder, whose resonance will always be uncertain.

——

Chocolat
Claire Denis, FR, 1988, 35mm, colour, 105′

Claire Denis’s debut film takes her back to Cameroon, which is the setting for a semi-autobiographical meditation on the colonial experience. Denis focuses on the relationship between the young daughter of a white French state official (Cécile Ducasse) and the black servant of the family (Isaach De Bankolé) in the latter days of colonialism.

“The experience of white people is always the same. We approach, approach, approach, but we never quite reach the heart of Africa. In Chocolat, I always tried to maintain only the perspective of white people. I just didn’t think I should pretend to understand the black point of view.”

Man No Run
Claire Denis, FR, 1989, 35mm, colour, 90′

In her first documentary, Claire Denis follows the Cameroonian band Les Têtes Brulées – known for their interpretation of the traditional Bikutsi music – during their first European tour. Denis had previously met bandleader Jean-Marie Ahanda (who later also made an appearance in White Material) during the production of Chocolat.

“I kept in touch with them as I was editing Chocolat, and they wrote me a letter and told me they were coming to France for a tour, their first tour outside of Cameroon. So I managed to find a camera and some filmm stock and there we were. I didn’t forsee my career. Things happen.”

S’en fout la mort
Claire Denis, FR, 1989, video, colour, 93′

In this film, shot by cinematographer Agnès Godard, Claire Denis uses the handheld camera for the first time to explore the raw, claustrophobic world of two friends from the Antilles and Benin (Alex Descas and Isaach De Bankolé) who decide to take part to take part in illegal cockfighting in a suburb of Paris.

“During the camera tests, I thought we had to move together with the actors. That’s when we decided to mount the camera on the shoulder. At the same time I thought, in view of the clandestinity of the actors, that I could not film them in a fixed frame, nor with a travelling or traditional dispositif, but that we had to be clandestine with the camera in order to accompany them, as far as possible, even into the space where they trained.”

US Go Home
Claire Denis, FR, 1994, colour, 61′

An episode of Tous les Garçons et les filles de leur âge, a series of portraits of French youth culture in the period between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, produced by ARTE. Claire Denis drew inspiration from her own childhood and, together with Anne Wiazemsky, wrote the story of a young woman (Alice Houri) who, together with her brother (Grégoire Colin) and her friend (Jessica Tharaud), goes to a party to explore the volatility of social and sexual relationships.

“I hated parties, but I was excited about the importance of music in the series. When I was an adolescent, my records and record player were my secret. Alone in my room, I listened to the Animals, the Yardbirds, Ronnie Bird. The idea of using their music was a powerful motivation to make the film”

Jacques Rivette, le veilleur
Claire Denis, Serge Daney, FR, 1989, video, colour, 130′

An episode from the series Cinéma, de notre temps about Jacques Rivette, who himself came up with the idea to have his portrait directed by Claire Denis. In the company of Serge Daney, Rivette ruminates about his early days at Cahiers du Cinéma and the development of his oeuvre.

“Jacques Rivette had seen my documentary about the musicians (Man No Run) and asked me to make his portrait. He had already made the first film of the series, the portrait of Jean Renoir — to whom he was an assistant — and said, ‘Claire was my assistant, so she must make the film about me.’ I didn’t propose it myself. I received the assignment. I was terrified, but I did it anyway. Again, it is something that happened by chance.”

J’ai pas sommeil
Claire Denis, CH, FR, 1994, 35mm, colour, 111′

The infamous Thierry Paulin case inspired Claire Denis for this film. Paulin was a young, black, homosexual, HIV-positive man who, together with his lover, murdered nineteen elderly women in Paris in the 1980s. Denis approaches the murder case through a circumferential movement, whereby the focus is shifted to a multitude of surrounding stories and characters.

“I quickly understood that the only way to approach the mystery of this kind of murder was through a concentric circle. I thought about the Goose board game. After all, it corresponds to the street map of Paris. The film is constructed according to that logic: from the periphery we travel to the city and then to the 18th arrondissement. The only way to approach the killer that seemed right to me was through accidental connections and encounters.”

Nénette et Boni
Claire Denis, FR, 1996, 35mm, colour, 102′

Following the production of US Go Home (1994), Claire Denis wanted to give a second life to the collaboration with actors Grégoire Colin and Alice Houri. In Nénette et Boni, again, they play brother and sister. They become separated from each other’s lives in Marseille until they meet each other during Nénette’s pregnancy. The film is pervaded by references to films by Marcel Pagnol, Jean Cocteau and Jacques Demy and uses music from the Tindersticks for the first time.

“While US Go Home was completely improvised, Nénette et Boni is a film that is very close to me, immersing me in memories of a shot or a sequence. It’s very exhilarating and at the same time destabilizing, because life experience is the only matrix for me to do this work. The intellectual experience is not for me.”

Beau Travail
Claire Denis, FR, 1999, 35mm, colour, 92′

Claire Denis’s undisputed masterpiece was created at the request of ARTE to contribute to the series Terres étrangères. The theme of the film led her to the work of Herman Melville, firstly his novel Billy Budd, Sailor and then to Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same name, and, on the other hand, to the idea of working around the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti (“For me, Africa is like the sea that Melville so dearly missed,” Denis said). The close collaboration with co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeaus, choreographer Bernardo Montet and actor Denis Lavant resulted in a miraculous “poetic rumination that pointedly doesn’t discriminate between major and minor events, intertwining both into a kind of endless magical tapestry” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Trouble Every Day
Claire Denis, FR, 2001, 35mm, colour, 101′

A film inspired by the desire to work again with actor Vincent Gallo and by the proposal to participate in a series of horror films. Claire Denis met the challenge by immersing herself in the fantasy novels of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and films such as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête; but at the same, she time decided not to erase the horror of an erotic desire that manifests itself as a devouring hunger by simply suggesting it. Instead, she made it explicit.

“It seemed necessary to me to push current boundaries: for me, not showing the devoration scenes would have been unacceptable. I refused the comfort of the ellipse or allusion for the same reasons that kept me away from pastiche. When you tell such a story, you must confront it, accept it as it is, accept that it puts you at risk.”

Vendredi Soir
Claire Denis, FR, 2002, 35mm, colour, 90′

An adaptation of the eponymous book by Emmanuèle Bernheim, about a passionate one-night stand between a woman (Valérie Lemercier) and a man (Vincent Lindon). Claire Denis approaches the almost wordless exchange and the growing desire with tactile sensitivity, resulting in a lyrical ode to the enjoyment of unexpected encounters.

“However important it is to determine the frame of the mise en scene, it is equally important, for me, to accompany the actors in an intimate way. This was the main challenge in Vendredi Soir: how to be intimate without becoming voyeuristic? How can you penetrate something while keeping a certain distance from it? It is important for me, when I film an actor, to always preserve a certain degree of modesty.”

L’Intrus
Claire Denis, FR, 2004, 35mm, colour, 130′

L’Intrus is inspired by the eponymous book by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, an intimate reflection on the idea of intrusion following his heart transplant. Claire Denis transformed this story into an elliptical fiction in which a heart patient travels the world in search of a new heart, until he becomes confronted with his past in Tahiti. Denis also drew inspiration from R.L. Stevenson’s In the South Seas and Gauguin’s paintings from his South Pacific period.

“The idea of transplantation has always fascinated me. I often talk about transplantation in my work. It’s as if cinema can only be really interesting to me if there’s a transplant involved. There’s no such thing as literature on one side and cinema on the other. Cinema enters literature—it’s transplanted, as it were. Reading L’intrus meant a lot to me. The mental dialogue I have with that book keeps me busy to this day.”

Vers Mathilde
Claire Denis, FR, 2004, 35mm, colour, 84′

Claire Denis’s portrait of the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier, with whom she shares a working relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy.

“Mathilde Monnier asked me to film one of her pieces. I told her that I didn’t have the time and that I wasn’t interested. However, because she was insistent, I proposed that I could film her work in my free time. We did it very simply: my brother did the sound, and Agnes or Ellen took care of the image. We worked like that for a year before we began to edit. I decided to focus on my relationship to Mathilde presenting her work, as if we were similar in our work processes. I felt that she wanted me to film her because she saw something similar in me, and she was right. We could be sisters.”

35 Rhums
Claire Denis, FR, 2008, 35mm, colour, 100′

An homage to the work of Yasujiro Ozu, in particular the father-daughter drama Late Spring (1949), but also to the relationship between Denis’s mother and her grandfather. A widower (Alex Descas) and his daughter (Mati Diop) live together in an apartment in a Parisian suburb, until the moment arrives to let go. With great tenderness, Claire Denis films the everyday rhythms of two closely connected people who are confronted with the passing of time.

“I once went to see some Ozu films with my mother, and I felt that the presence of the father in his films reminded her of her father — my grandfather. I felt increasingly inclined towards the desire to make a film about it. But in reality, I let go of the idea because I couldn’t immediately think of who could play that man. My grandfather was Brazilian; I could feel that he wasn’t French. Being a foreigner, it seemed as if his daughter was his only family. Even when I was little, I could see that he only had eyes for her.”

White Material
Claire Denis, CM, FR, 2009, 35mm, colour, 106′

For the shoot of White Material Claire Denis returned to Cameroon, where she spent a considerable part of her youth. With the encouragement of actress Isabelle Huppert and in close collaboration with writer Marie NDiaye, she created the story of a white coffee plantation owner who stubbornly tries to hold on to her land when a violent civil war breaks out. In this film, Denis returns to a theme that’s dear to her: the friction between intruding and belonging, between foreignness and sameness.

“The presence of foreign bodies in my work stems from my childhood. I myself have experienced how a foreign body feels and that’s also why I made the film L’Intrus, about the intrusion of a hostile body. That’s also what I wanted to do in White Material: show that even if white men think they are the rulers of the world, their whiteness is sometimes hostile.”

Aller au diable
Claire Denis, FR, 2011, 35mm, colour, 42′

Commissioned as part of the Jeonju Digital Project, Aller au diable blends elements of autobiography with documentary interviews (including a conversation with the notorious outlaw gold-mining boss Jean Bena) as Claire Denis and actor Jean-Christophe Folly travel to French Guiana to research an upcoming feature film about the Alukus, a group of escaped former slaves who established their own society in defiance of corrupt local governments.

+

Le Camp Breidjing
Claire Denis, FR, 2015, HD, colour, 52′

Claire Denis’s contribution to the Réfugiés project by ARTE, who asked numerous filmmakers, photographers and artists to record testimonies of life in different refugee camps. Denis filmed Breidjing camp, in the East of Chad. Over the past ten years, the camp has developed into a real city where more than forty thousand refugees from Darfur live.

Les Salauds
Claire Denis, DE, FR, 2012, DCP, colour, 100′

Encouraged by the challenge of her producer to write a film off the cuff, Claire Denis and co-scenarist Jean-Pol Fargeau invented a dark revenge drama in the spirit of Akira Kurasawa’s The Bad Sleep Well and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. The result is an elliptically structured fate tragedy in which a sailor (Vincent Lindon) returns to Paris and ends up in a tangle of twisted family relationships, sexual exploitation and manipulation.

“I didn’t feel like I was nearing an abyss. I knew we were on the front line, certainly: death is present from the beginning until the end of the film. For me, there is nothing stronger than thinking about what is forbidden and why it is forbidden. I’m talking about what is morally forbidden. What we call taboo only exists because it is inherent in human nature.”

Un beau soleil intérieur

Claire Denis, FR, 2017, DCP, colour, 94′

The proposal to make an adaptation of Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux inspired Claire Denis to write a film, together with writer Christine Angot, about the agony of love. Juliette Binoche shines as Isabelle: a divorced woman, around fifty years old, who’s looking for true love. The way in which Denis portrays the encounters, uncertainties and disappointments of her protagonist shows extraordinary warmth and intelligence.

“For me, Juliette is still the young girl I discovered in Téchiné’s Rendez-vous. Her character still believes in love. With all her body confidence, Juliette stands for the absolute parade against death. Agony is what controlled me when I was young myself. Here, however, we see the exploits of a woman who wants something that suits her.”

CLAIRE DENIS SHORTS

Bibliothèque modèle pour les enfants (Chroniques d’en France n°87)

Claire Denis, FR, 1973, 16mm, colour, 7′

À propos de Nice, la suite: Nice, Very Nice

Claire Denis, FR, 1994, colour, 10′

Voilà l’enchaînement

Claire Denis, 2014, DCP, colour, 30′

Ten Minutes Older: The Cello:Vers Nancy

Claire Denis, FR, 2001, Digibeta, b&w, 10′

Le 15 Mai
Claire Denis, 1969, video, colour, 28′