Claire Denis
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Testing the Bechdel Test
One of the clever recent innovations at the subscription streaming service Fandor is the ability to filter films using the Bechdel Test. Created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel Test applies three criteria to judge the quality of female representation in a motion picture: 1) it has to have at least two [named] women in it; 2) who talk to each other; 3) about something besides a man. In a new video essay, “Beyond Bechdel: Testing Feminism in Film,” Lee interrogates the Bechdel Test using films from the Fandor library, asking whether the test is a meaningful criteria when considering […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 9, 2014 -
The Limits of Supernatural Subversions: Under The Skin and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
The following essay contains spoilers. As far as premises go, Under The Skin’s most alluring intimation of Scarlett Johansson rolling around the slick Glasgow streets, seducing men left and right, is actually not as titillating as it sounds – unless you’re one for inverted gender plays (not for nothing is she perched behind the wheel of a predatorial white van). Each would-be sex scene instead succumbs to alien interpretation. As smoothly as she rolls down the car window, inquiring after irrelevant directions, Johansson’s Laura takes the man in question not to bed, but to another dimension. She moves backward on […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 3, 2014 -
Bastards — A Hammer To Nail Review
(Bastards is being released theatrically on Wednesday, October 23, 2013 and on iTunes and VOD two days later, through Sundance Selects. It world premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.) Arguably the most muscular of contemporary cineastes, Claire Denis engineers some of the richest filmic experiences that viewers can treat themselves to — or punish themselves with. Denis’ work contains soothing and unsettling multitudes, but for the sake of making heads or tails of her latest feature, Bastards, let’s posit that throughout her career she has generally alternated between two modes: one is mellow, sensual, drift-like and attuned to the […]
by Dan Sullivan on Oct 23, 2013 -
“Only At the End You Can See the Origin of Tragedy…. So I Used a Small Camera”: Claire Denis on Bastards
Over 25 years of directing films, Claire Denis has explored the silent rhythms of men and women as they move through spaces of romance and violence, attraction and solitude in stories that range from the love affairs of cannibals (Trouble Every Day), to the exercises of the French Foreign legion (Beau Travail), to the every day spaces of domesticity (35 Shots of Rum). A filmmaker who prefers monologue to dialogue, and silence to any speech at all, her intimate spaces, impressionistic photography, and oblique scenarios can divide audiences, but provide untold riches for those willing to forgo plot devices and […]
by David Barker on Oct 23, 2013 -
NYFF Critics Notebook: Stray Dogs, Bastards, Redemption
The New York Film Festival’s most exciting offerings are often those deemed “undistributable” and unlikely to make a return visit soon, with Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs this year’s standard-bearer. By 2009’s Face, Tsai seemed in an increasingly droll mood, embracing slow-burn physical comedy for its own sake; Stray Dogs — his first feature since — strips out nearly all levity under digital’s harsh glare. An early daylight shot of an isolated rural area is representatively demanding/rewarding, initially nearly swallowed by a dense cluster of skinny trees, whose semi-open circle hedges in a cave-like darkness lit by floating motes slowly identifiable […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 9, 2013 -
Ursula Meier and Agnes Godard on Sister
Switzerland’s submission for the best international picture is Ursula Meier’s Sister, starring the stunning and earthy Léa Seydoux as a Swiss hot mess and Kacey Mottet Klein as her weedy 12-year-old brother who supports them both through petty thefts. It’s a subtle, complex film that avoids obvious polarities of class, family, even landscape. As director Meier said to me recently of the mountain resort setting, and about finding her way into the script by focusing on the location of the ski lift cable cars, “It’s the place where he belongs, between two worlds. And it’s also the rhythm of the […]
by Miriam Bale on Oct 5, 2012 -
“Starting With an Idea is Fake. It’s a Dead Form”: Claire Denis on White Material
Plenty of associations come to mind when one thinks of a Claire Denis film; the French auteur’s work is intelligent, nuanced, and frankly, often slow. Denis approaches her films like a sculptor, beginning with the giant block of matter that is a life (or lives) and whittling the irrelevant away until she finds a character’s essence. So it comes as something a surprise that the final act of Denis’ latest, White Material, plays out as something of a suspense thriller; Denis has worked in genre filmmaking before (notably Trouble Every Day), but typically inverts and eschews genre convention. However, while […]
by Zachary Wigon on Nov 17, 2010 -
HEARTSTOPPING
Dennis Lim has a great appreciation in the Village Voice today about Claire Denis’s memorable and mysterious new film L’Intrus (or, The Intruder). Opening at the Quad in some kind of stealth release from Wellspring, the film continues the intuitive, searching and philosophical cinema that Denis has been pursuing since Beau Travail. It’s a cinema in which storyline, subtext, motivation and the unconcious are all interwoven as they collectively pursue a meaning that is as much in the viewer’s mind as it is in the celluloid. Writes Lim: “Allergic to the dictates of linear storytelling, her movies have grown increasingly […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 21, 2005
