No Fear: The Films of Claire Denis
IFC's survey of Denis' work opens on Wednesday, November 10 (with her first feature "Chocolat") and will run until Thursday, November 18
Andrew Hussey
The Observer
Sunday 4 July 2010
'For the past decade or so, Denis has regularly been hailed as one of the leading French directors of her generation. This is mainly because, as her track record demonstrates, she is fearless. She does not shy away from difficult subjects – including sex, cannibalism, incest, politics, murder, race, sometimes all of them at the same time. It is this bravery that has inspired many critics to hail her as not only one of the most technically accomplished directors of recent years, but also as one of the leading chroniclers of 21st-century France in all its postcolonial complexity. She has even recently been mooted by at least one serious critic as "one of the greatest film-makers working today".'
'She is fascinated by the intimacy and frailty of human relations, and tries not to categorise or define those experiences. She is drawn to extremes of experience – violence is a key motif, but so are betrayal and troubled sexuality. This tendency has led her to make mistakes. Perhaps her most disastrous error was the 2001 film Trouble Every Day, starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle. Its ludicrous plot about sex-hungry cannibalistic vampires in Paris drew derisive laughter when it was screened in Cannes and its gory scenes had even hardened horror fans retching in disgust. Denis found herself briefly bracketed with the "new French extremity" wave of films, fashionable in the late 1990s for depicting sex and death with pornographic relish. "Extreme" directors included the likes of Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat and Bertrand Bonello, who all claimed to be extending the boundaries of the cinema by outdoing one another in nastiness.
That is not where Claire Denis belonged at all. At this distance the best we could agree about Trouble Every Day is that the sly and moody soundtrack by British band Tindersticks is superb. Denis has a longstanding association with Tindersticks' singer Stuart Staples and the band have provided several soundtracks to her films, including White Material.
At its best, however, her work is truly "prismatic". That is a word, often overused by cinema critics, to describe work that is dreamy, elliptical and apparently disconnected from real life. Denis's approach is to take on reality from a variety of angles – she refracts real experience with a cinematic method that always seeks to conceal more than it reveals. In this way, as seen in the dream-like, terrible landscapes of White Material, she can literally open up a new field of vision.
This approach was not part of her ambition when she started making pictures, she says now. "I always wanted to make an epic. I love epic adventures as I have always loved travelling. An epic adventure takes you on a journey to a place that you have never been before. That is why I love the cinema of David Lean. When you went to see Ryan's Daughter or Lawrence of Arabia, he took you on a journey, and you never knew quite where it was going, or what it was all going to mean. That kind of cinema is gone now. The technology has changed. The digital era also means that the money has gone. But it is a proud ambition for a film-maker to have, to take the viewer somewhere new."
So does this mean that for all her reputation as a difficult and tricky film-maker, she also has a simpler aim: to entertain? "The cinema gives pleasure, certainly. But most of all for me, film-making is a journey into the impossible. When I make a film I have to be like a military commander, in charge of every strategy and tactic, but I never really know where we are going."
At this point she leans across to me, and she finally has a warm if secretive smile. "But of course," she says, "I can never let anyone know this."'
Read the rest of the article here.
No comments:
Post a Comment