Claire Denis
Claire Denis may well be the greatest female filmmaker in the history of cinema – but what’s for sure is that she hates that label. ‘When you say “female director” I already want to stop this conversation!’ Denis declaimed in a 2018 interview. ‘Female director? I feel like I am an animal. I am a female director like this is a female bird. No, I am a director.’1
At a time when conversations about gender disparity in directing have dominated film discourse, Denis remains defiant, a refusenik uninterested in participating in the conversation. ‘I couldn’t care less about the [Harvey] Weinstein affair – it hasn’t changed anything for women,’ she has said, dismissing the #MeToo discussion as ‘bourgeois’.2 You can forgive her for regarding the conversation as reductive and uninteresting (‘Is it more difficult for women to make films? Sure. But we know this’3 ), given she’s spent three decades being asked these questions.
Denis was born in Paris in 1946. When she was two months old, her parents packed up and moved to Cameroon, where her father would later be employed by the French government. Her childhood was spent moving around Africa: Somalia, Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Senegal. She recalls that her father ‘was very interested in African culture’, ‘spoke many African languages’ and ‘was always in favor of African independence’.4 After a bout of polio as a teenager, Denis returned to France, feeling alien back in her own homeland. She left home at seventeen, moved to London, married an older man at nineteen. Separating soon after, she returned to Paris, went to film school and began her filmmaking life as an apprentice.5
She doesn’t want to make movies to forward social issues, to educate or comfort viewers: ‘I’m not so sure films should be made to soothe people’s pain,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be a social worker.’
She worked for years as assistant director in France, often for Robert Enrico, but soon her wanderlust informed her collaborations: she worked with Costa-Gavras in Israel (1983's Hanna K.), Wim Wenders in the United States (1984’s Paris, Texas) and West Germany (1987’s Wings of Desire), and Jim Jarmusch in America’s Deep South (1986’s Down by Law). Denis’ first directorial effort, Chocolat (1988), returned her to Cameroon, and, since then, her films have travelled to different places, both literal and figurative. No Fear, No Die (1990) is set around underground cockfighting rings in the markets of Paris’ downtrodden outer suburbs; I Can’t Sleep (1994), amid apartment towers filled with immigrants and dangers; Nenette and Boni (1996), among the hustlers and dock workers of Marseilles; and Friday Night (2002), on nocturnal Parisian streets thrown into chaos by a transport strike. Elsewhere, U.S. Go Home (1994) travels back to the 1960s, in which a young girl grows up near an American military base in France; Beau Travail (1999) depicts a troop of legionnaires training and killing time in Djibouti; and The Intruder (2004) journeys from France to the Swiss Alps, Japan, South Korea and Tahiti, its obtuse reverie on the wanderings of a dying man depicting the inability to escape from one’s (and one’s nation’s) past. More recently, White Material (2009) returns the director to Africa, where a white family is faced with a violent political uprising; and High Life (2018), Denis’ latest film, journeys out into space, in her English-language feature debut starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche and Outkast’s André Benjamin.
Whatever ‘women’s cinema’ is supposed to be, few would identify Denis as making it. ‘I’m interested in the slice of humanity that surrounds a monster,’ she says in the documentary (Sébastien Lifshitz, 1996). is about a serial killer who targets elderly women, (2013) is an unflattering(2001) is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Her films are poetic, but percolate with rage, and often explode into violence. ‘Anger is part of my relation to the world,’ she says. ‘I’m filled with anger, I’m filled with regret, I’m filled with great memories, also poetic memories.’ She doesn’t want to make movies to forward social issues, to educate or comfort viewers: ‘I’m not so sure films should be made to soothe people’s pain,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be a social worker. I want to share something that is a vision, or a feeling.’ And (2016) director Barry Jenkins, an ardent Denis admirer, identifies this defiance as her defining quality: ‘I get the sense that she truly just doesn’t give a shit.’
