Claire Denis

this is weird because i was going to search for this thread today and forgot to. i just watched beau travail and you're right it's awesome. 35 shots of rum is in queue.

my favorite director, i think. also i love beatrice dalle

chocolat was her most conventional though! haven't seen '35 shots of rum' yet, and there's a 2009 film as well the title of which escapes me.. was on film comment end of year list, the one of films that haven't been distributed in the US.

it'a called White Material, and from early reviews it seems to go back to The Intruder style (as oppose to the more conventional and warm 35 Rums), but it's not as successful as the former.
it doesnt have a distributer for France or U.S yet, although Isabelle Huppert is in the cast.

i've heard the opposite of reviews - it apparently occupies similar territory to chocolat and is great.

my favorite director, i think.

yeah. even 'minor' denis is great - looking back on the last few films i tend to forget trouble every day and vendredi soir, but they're both great, the latter in particular (& probably the closest to rhums)

has anyone seen her earlier, non-chocolat stuff? she made a docu on a french group called something like mannorun that's meant to be very good.

35 Shots of Rum tonight!

still haven't seen it

i was listening to one of the cinema shows on france culture radio.. projection privee, they interviewed claire denis for the whole show the week of april 3. at some point the interviewer asked about the title of 'white material' and she told this funny story about someone at a screening who mistakenly called it 'white trash' and she was like well yeah kinda! she didn't work with agnes godard on that one, it was the cinematographer who usually works with dumont.

she is the head of jury in Canees 2010 Un Certain Regard

well, Alfred?

I was kinda whelmed by White Material, and find Beau Travail a tad pretentious despite all the hot Legionnaires.

kind of shrill and very self-righteous

i really like trouble every day but i like "cold" and "unflinching"

well, Alfred?

Oh, sorry: http://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/35-shots-of-rum-shot-of-love/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7j9iSbz0qc

<3 <3 <3

my favorite director, i think.

Mine, too.

35 Shots of Rum is perfect! Beau Travail is still her best, but Rum is up there. Alfred, I think Noé (Gregoire Colin's character) is much more sympathetic than you give him credit for. The key to the ending can be found in Ozu's Late Spring.

I'm going to rewatch it.

Is The Intruder worth a soak?

The Intruder is definitely worth watching. It's much less linear than her other films. I'm not even sure what happens in it, especially in the second half. But, it's beautiful and fascinating, and, by the end, I felt like I was beginning to understand some things about the characters, even if I couldn't tell what parts of the movie were real and what were imagined/dreamed.

"The Intruder is definitely worth watching"

otm

very interesting film. while not everything works - some of the images (which are mainly about crossing physical and mental borders) are perfect.

White Material is quite something... with Denis i'm never sure what the hell to think but "quite something" is usually about the extent of what i can come up with. it's very Denis, very immersive, it drops you right in in the middle of a situation and allows you to work things through or not depending on how involved you get. i was actually floundering for most of the film, trying to make the connections (on as simple a level as trying to work out who the hell people are as well as trying to fit together the deeper political social and familial framework). stylistically i would say it occupies an exact middle ground between chocolat and l'intrus. definitely worth seeking out.

In terms of actors we have Huppert and Christopher Lambert, who i haven't seen in years. almost every other major part, and some of the minor ones, is played by an actor who has been in a Denis film before. Issac de Bankole, Michel Subor, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Adèle Ado...

DS: You use a lot of the same actors repeatedly, which creates a kind of ongoing dialogue between each of your films.

CD: It's not a career decision. When a film is over, I am missing those people, I want them a little more. One film is not enough with them, so we need another one. And it's the same with the people I'm working with. Like Agnés. I never have enough of them. I think life offers a lot of variation and diversity, but I enjoy this diversity with the people I like. We glance at each other and we know what we are doing without a word because we trust each other. And this feeling is great. And it doesn't mean it makes things easy, because also this sort of trust is very demanding. The need is always never to be frustrated, never to be tired of working together.

was gonna see 35 shots of rum on netflix but it's coming to a theater near me so i will wait. pumped tbh

White Material is showing here in a coupla weeks. 35 Rhums was great.

I really enjoyed White Material, but found it to be rather simple. It could be the structuring which leads to a mood of foreboding (Tindersticks help massively here). While it is complex, I think it has a very particular view on colonialism and Huppert's character that is unbending. Really great film, all in all, but not up to the standard of 35 Shots of Rum (which I saw at the cinema again tonight), which has a magnificent ambiguity in regards to its central theme.

vendredi soir is still the only denis I've seen - it was so slight I just ignored her afterwards

have l'intrus and 35 shots sat here tho to watch as soon as I've digested assayas' carlos

get with the program, cozen

hopefully white material will show in my crap town...can't get enough of huppert especially in a denis film...

Really great film, all in all, but not up to the standard of 35 Shots of Rum (which I saw at the cinema again tonight), which has a magnificent ambiguity in regards to its central theme.

Gukbe, what do you mean by ambiguity in Rum? The only Denis film where I see real ambiguity is L'Intrus.

Well, no plot ambiguity, just character motivation as well as a twisting of the running theme of family and letting go. It seems to me (for a myriad of reasons, really) that Josephine SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS marries Noé to keep their family unit together. The bond and the strength and the comfort they've taken from those relationships might prevent Lionel or another one of them from ending up like René, but at the same time traps them.

Got it. Thanks. I interpret their motivations differently, but I see where you're coming from. And, there's some of the same sort of ambiguity of motivation in Ozu's Late Spring!

anyone see no fear, no die? outside shorts and the rivette docu it's my one blank spot.

I have. It's worth seeing, though it's lesser Denis. Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas give good, intense performances, as you'd expect. It has an extremely claustrophobic atmosphere, where seething resentments and racial tensions contribute to a man's slow breakdown. See it!

should white material get its own thread?

liked it a lot btw

Weird -- watched a bit of I Can't Sleep two hours ago.

bumping for Morbs' White Material input.

I thought White Material was pretty bad, and politically dodgy. Really disappointed after her last few films were so great.

explain politically dodgy

beau travail looked GORGEOUS and i was watching on vhs

anyone seen Home ? - 08 isabelle huppert -- sounds cheesy but agnes godard

white material was playing down the street from me and i somehow didnt know abt it til its last night when i couldnt go :(

watched Nenette et Boni a couple weeks ago — incredibly sensual but I had a problem understanding the characters' motivations.

finally getting to White Material tomorrow (luscious Criterion edition).

it is 50% off on Amazon today.

No thanks!

semi-related: there's a beautiful pick from the white material score on the tindersticks sampler that came with sight and sound. it makes me want to check out the whole thing.

apparently she wrote an enthusiastic piece on kore-eda in cahiers, once. i wish i could find it. i have US Go Home queued up for some spare night soon.

oh wow u.s. go home. as good as the others, i wasn't expecting it.

excellent. I didn't care for White Material.

i- i think i still have that confusion from white material, the way i did catching in the mood for love after chungking, expecting the latter so not knowing how to deal with the former. & i was so psyched for white material but, that it obviously wasn't giving me what i'd expected from 35 rhums, not necessarily in tone but just in such exquisite juxtaposition & montage, threw me. i feel like if i rescreened i'd probably admire greatly - it's breadth is a lot to take in at first, and the son's weird tangent feels like a digression. i liked its tension. that is probably what everyone says.

but i almost feel bad, thinking about white material while watching us go home, because i so just want her to do that, do her thing, film people dancing and make a muybridge wheel from the faces you see each time the pair rotate. & i wonder how it must feel preparing to make another film, knowing that zooming into any kind of territory in which people are bouncing off each other & relating & gently affecting one another would give her opportunity to do that again and again. you so inhabit the mood of a girl attending a party that has excited while on the horizon but which disappoints and leaves one directionless while attending. there is a scene of two girls being kind of loud on a bus, & you are even 'with' them then, understanding them, remembering. it unfolds so gracefully.

i probably would have got around to catching this sooner had someone told me how much of it was dancing. really a canonical teenage film, i think (would have to build up the rest of this canon, but: seventeen, paranoid park, ..?)

http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/2585/vlcsnap2011100500h00m06.png

WM felt like a step backward: a re-examiniation of the Chocolat material without the precision.

would really be testing my memory & its ability to correlate material seen years apart to compare the two, here, but i don't know if it isn't too narrow to treat them as being similar; i feel like WM is kinda intended as a very sensory 'mood piece', with a whole psychotic underside, making you inhabit isabelle huppert & taking you through her routine as it grows more claustrophobic, i guess still looking at displacement and belonging and stuff, but in quite a different way/from a diff POV than chocolat. which was precise, and more level, as far as i remember. i guess i'm arguing that locale & even subject, colonialism, don't qualify as being the same 'material', which i'd feel more nervous about were it not for mood being as significant an aspect of denis' films as anything else in them.

I know what you're saying. In WM her method of evoking fails her though. I wrote at the time: "Her her fondness for lacuna can turn her pictures into thesis statements for unfinished college essays."

ha, yeah - like i say i don't want to really judge the success of WM because i was slightly mixed up when watching it, but i think that's interesting & nails her 'approach'. it really is a long time since i saw chocolat, however, & i think i keep it separate from the more sensuous, evocative films because it isn't (iirc) using that toolset to talk to the viewer. i think that sparsity in white material is part of its intentionally uneven, ill-fitting & anxious sprawl, though that perhaps contradicts what i said about the film being her interior POV.

i went to see CD in conversation a while ago, incidentally, & have been meaning to dig out the notebook i was using at the time to transcribe what i scribbled down - was v inspirational, the debate coinciding with the box set of tindersticks' film scores that came out so kinda musically themed, but just very lovely in general. she has this great voice that sounds like every cigarette she ever smoked. there's an interesting clip here where she starts to talk about montage, w/a lovely off-hand line about the significance of a chair in a scene.

i was thinking about denis films, i guess in anticipation of the next, & suddenly found or thought that something they have in common is this slightly unwieldy, slightly too expansive range. in each there is ordinarily an extra thread that loosens the focus - the son in white material, the murders in i can't sleep, even the depressed driver in something as otherwise fairly compact as rhums. it's strange for me to think of them with reference to this one characteristic, as if there's something imperfect or misjudged about them, when i think it probably can't be neatly separated from what makes the films work. the best thing that haneke does is show a disconnect between the participants in his films, a moment with a child talking to an adult in which each is clearly on a different frequency. & i feel like maybe denis does the opposite, in giving us enough of a sense of space and variety and sprawl as to understand the connections made against that backdrop. it isn't that she's going for that panoramic or sort of modernist-Dos-Passos-narrative thing, i don't think. i don't know what it is. but she obviously does something through montage and territory that no-one else does & it feels surprising to notice a commonality that isn't as immediately celebratable as, you know, her dance scenes or smart use of music or smoldering leads or w/e.

i hope you will. it's one of her best.

That is a film I fell in love with instantly. I have yet to see all other Denis movies apart from the latest with Juliette Binoche, but the memory of The Intruder still lingers on, years after the viewing.
The confusionary state(s) it put across was the thing I most loved about it.

NYC retro

https://www.bam.org/film/2019/strange-desire-the-films-of-claire-denis

she'll be here too

metrograph.com/series/series/213/an-evening-with-claire-denis

Coming up to the city for the last day of High Life and missing the Kaurismäki Metrograph retro by one day 😔

saw Bastards. I like that Claire Denis uses The Tindersticks in the soundtracks of two of her films

She's used the Tindersticks or Stuart Staples in every film she's made since Nenette et Boni in 1996!

never saw Nenette et Boni, only started noticing it with the title song to Trouble Every Day. didn't realize that they did the scores for 35 Rhums and White Material

amazing scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIIzc_DluY4

I like that! US Go Home is another one of her films I still have to watch

glad to see Gregoire Colin show up in so many of her films

she loves amateur dance scenes so much. i do too!

They always express character.

Alex Descas is amazing in No Fear No Die… viscerally painful. And 180 degrees from his character 18 years later in 35 Rhums.

I really liked ‘35 Rhums’ but don’t think I’ve seen any of Denis’ other films.

out today on CC

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6380-let-the-sunshine-in-one-love

Claire on bad men

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6392-all-the-bad-men-in-let-the-sunshine-in

Do you have gluten-free olives?

That actor is Xavier Beauvois, the director of Of Gods and Men and Les Guardiennes. He's very good in that scene!

yep

Bfi putting on a season of her films this month

I just got back from Brazil and felt like banging you!

keep it to yourself streaming here http://www.lecinemaclub.com/

for yourself*

thinking back on it, "high life" plays better in my head as one big joke about being way too high all the time

or onanistic

High Life is a really great title

Bad take

“The fact Adèle Haenel got up and walked out [at the Césars] – I mean, she has the right to, but with her finger pointed at us shouting "shame!" – I found that a bit strange. People voted, they thought Polanski's film was the best, that's the Césars." – Claire Denis pic.twitter.com/si3b1V57DZ

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) March 9, 2020

Why?

Well, for one they probably thought Ladj Ly was the best, but he won Best Film and couldn't win both

Yeah, there were five other options still.

Adèle Haenel is a victim of child sex abuse and the fact that she vocally objected to this win and left the auditorium is laudable. What’s she supposed to do? Sit quietly and hope that they do better next year?

I haven't read it yet but there's a whole interview with Claire Denis in Le Monde about this. She seems to be saying that Adèle Haenel's anger is 'fundamentally just' but she didn't 'pick the right time to speak out', whatever the fuck that means.

I'm also weirded out by this argument:

A quoi sert, d’ailleurs, de le dire si tard [que « distinguer Polanski, ce serait cracher sur les victimes »] ? Dans cette logique, il faudrait priver Polanski de toute aide de l’Etat et l’interdire au Centre national de la cinématographie, comme semble l’y encourager le ministre de la culture. Mais dès lors que Polanski est autorisé à vivre en France et à faire des films en France, il me semble difficile de l’éconduire aussi tardivement.

Quick translation:

What point is there, incidentally, in saying it so late [that honouring Polanski is tantamount to spitting in the victims' faces]? If we go by this logic, Polanski should be denied all state funding and be banned from the Centre national de la cinématographie, which is what the minister of culture seems to be advocating. But insofar as Polanski is given leave to reside in France and to make films in France, it seems difficult to usher him out so late.

Ok…?

Minister for culture otm.

I haven't read it yet but there's a whole interview with Claire Denis in Le Monde about this. She seems to be saying that Adèle Haenel's anger is 'fundamentally just' but she didn't 'pick the right time to speak out', whatever the fuck that means.

― romanesque architect (pomenitul), Monday, March 9, 2020 2:39 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Booooo. Denis calling her protest "strange" is stupid & and lol you always know someone has actually picked 'the right time to speak out' when others criticize them for exactly that.

but Polanski's film won--I guess "thats the Cesars"

(and I am booing Denis, I am with you pom)

Minister for culture otm.

Poor guy has been tested positive for Covid-19. :(

Did Both Sides of the Blade play anywhere beside a couple of obscure DC-area theaters? My initial impression is Let the Sunshine In except bad, so I'll excuse anyone who missed this for whatever reason.

(The downtown Landmark theater that usually gives this sort of film one week is tied up right now with the Thor and Top Gun movies.)

https://metrograph.com/claire-denis-introduces-lintrus/

No chatter about the new one, eh? I'm almost finished.

Which one? There were two this year right?

not managed to see either of the two ones but seems strange how quickly she seems to have swung from being extremely en vogue to out of it

Haven't seen Stars at Noon but Both Sides of the Blade is up there with Let the Sunshine In among her newer stuff, for me

Doesn't Beau Travail scoring so highly in the S&S poll mean she's still in some kind of vogue (genuine question!) Or does it cement her as a prolific artist whose recent work is doomed to be compared unfavourably with her greatest hit(s)? White Material - a sobering 13 years ago - is the last one that really did it for me, and I still think it's a bit neglected.

I liked this quote from her in a recent Sight and Sound:

To meet Marguerite Duras was to go to the kitchen and learn how to cook

stars at noon worked for me ~ it nicely captured the confusing nature of an accidental new relationship btwn qualley & allwyn's characters w the similarly confusing geopolitical backdrop--one's left uncertain of anothers motivations at every turn idk i think it pulled it off tho i can def see ppl dismiss this

plus the tindersticks title track is lovely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzE0XSeQpO0

curious abt the denis johnson novel also

Cinema Guild announced that the new Blu-ray for “35 Shots of Rum” is being corrected because the wrong movie was pressed on to the disc.

Some buyers who pre-ordered it have received it, and upon playing said disc, the movie is hilariously “Road House” with Patrick Swayze.