Claire Denis

catalog

Well-known member
I liked Audiard's Sisters Brothers adaptation with Phoenix and Reilly, but can't remember anything about A Prophet.
that was his big hollywood break. saw it at the cinema and it was OK, but i don't think it made enough waves. A prophet is the one for me.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah two parter wasn't it?
yeah, with vince cassell. i watched it, sort of like the long 2 part che by soderbergh that was out around the same time. these films were like the transition to series telly. they would have been better as six parters or something
 

catalog

Well-known member
i just realised i made a mistake with the ref to À ma sœur! - it's by Catherine Breillat not Claire Denis. Oops.
 

forclosure

Well-known member
Also straight people can certainly direct "queer" films, just like queer people can direct "straight" films, and they don't have to be queer to read their films queer. I mean Billy Budd is like, pretty fucking gay. Not as gay as Top Gun maybe, but close.

This is exactly why people LOVE Point Break.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
how? they might be intense frence women but they're pretty different filmmakers imo
Oh it's not based on any similarity in the films that they make, purely on the way that people talk about them, or even, not the way they talk about them, but where. In short, both French women directors, both recognised as being distinctive and... not exactly underground but filmmakers who are idiosyncratic rather than attempting to make blockbusters.

When I saw this thread title my first thought was "did she do that one with Rocco Siffredi when they drink tampon tea?" and then I googled and realised that that was Catherine Breillat. And then I looked through their filmographies and realised that a lot of the films that I had in the back of my mind as being made by Claire Denis were in fact by Breillat. But yeah, this is very much not based on any similarity off style cos, I'm not gonna go quite as far as Catalog in that I have certainly seen Trouble Every Day at least, and I think I may have seen some of her others, but I've not seen enough to get a handle on her style or to really talk about how it differs from or is similar to that of Breillat.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
But that's different cos they just adapt a few of the stories as separate segments.

I'm particularly thinking of things such as World War Z. I found that book in a charity shop (as with about eighty percent of what I read) and it's quite an interesting idea. Basically it takes the form of hundreds of accounts compiled to give an overall view of how zombies appeared, grew in numbers, became an existential threat to humanity and then how a fightback began.

One chapter is (say) a Chinese doctor talking about the discovery of a strangely behaving degenerate who tried to bite all the hospital staff. The next is about how a village in Sweden was terrorised by a group of mindless biters, then the next might be a US army report on what happened to a sleepy base in Alaska and so on and so forth... no central character and every chapter takes place in a different place and (I think that this correct) might be written in a different style eg as a first person narrative or as an official army report or whatever.

Then they made a film of the book. It has Brad Pitt in it and so he has to be the star and so he has to appear in every scene, so the entire structure of the book - the thing that made it interesting in other words - goes straight out the window and so you end up with a completely generic zombie film that has the same name as the book (except for some incomprehensible reason they even changed the name too so they say it World War Zee).
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
man all the stuff to do with the daughter's university class and they talk about the IMF and how the global south still has this debt to pay to the west and how bullshit it all is.

I remember thinking first time i saw that was like "you mean to tell me some little French woman was addressing this in 2008? what other director was doing this at the time?"
oh word I somehow thought you mean the opposite thing by "captures", that makes more sense

no other examples come to mind but I doubt she was the only director addressing the IMF/global south in 2008, tho it's usually less direct than having a class of grad students just discuss it for the audience. I experienced the heyday of antiglobalization in the early 00s - the whole scene of post-Seattle huge protests against the IMF, World Bank, G8, FTAA, etc - and tho I wasn't really paying attention to film at the time I do feel like that was definitely the moment when the basic injustice of that debt peaked in Western etc public consciousness, before it was essentially wiped out and replaced by the financial crisis. I'd bet she filmed that before the financial crisis broke, in fact.

anyway, I agree, I think she's pretty good on power dynamics. one of her more recent films that I haven't seen - White Material - sounds like almost a response to the white people having character arcs and emotional journeys to an African backdrop of something like Out of Africa (which isn't even a like, bad movie, just one that would nowadays I assume at least try to give non-white characters some kind of agency, rather than just functions of the white main characters the surround). High Material is about, among other things, indentured servitude.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
and I'd never deny that Point Break is deeply homoerotic - Keanu + Swayze have a meet-cute for chrissakes - but it's a different kind of homoeroticism from 80s action. shirtless, but no baby oil. or kinda, idk, a (much) more sublimated, applied (it is a Hollywood action film) version of Jarman. cos it 's not just about bodies and sex - Keanu + Swayze clearly have the deepest emotional connection in the movie, by far. or like if you made a line graph of absurd like Tom of Finland+ on one end and artsy queer erotica at the other it would be something like

Top Gun jean shorts volleyball -- all other 80s action -- Point Break -- Beau Travail -- Jarman
 

shakahislop

Well-known member
oh word I somehow thought you mean the opposite thing by "captures", that makes more sense

no other examples come to mind but I doubt she was the only director addressing the IMF/global south in 2008, tho it's usually less direct than having a class of grad students just discuss it for the audience. I experienced the heyday of antiglobalization in the early 00s - the whole scene of post-Seattle huge protests against the IMF, World Bank, G8, FTAA, etc - and tho I wasn't really paying attention to film at the time I do feel like that was definitely the moment when the basic injustice of that debt peaked in Western etc public consciousness, before it was essentially wiped out and replaced by the financial crisis. I'd bet she filmed that before the financial crisis broke, in fact.

anyway, I agree, I think she's pretty good on power dynamics. one of her more recent films that I haven't seen - White Material - sounds like almost a response to the white people having character arcs and emotional journeys to an African backdrop of something like Out of Africa (which isn't even a like, bad movie, just one that would nowadays I assume at least try to give non-white characters some kind of agency, rather than just functions of the white main characters the surround). High Material is about, among other things, indentured servitude.

Taking this thread on a massive tangent, my impression with the World Bank / IMF thing is that they knocked a lot of the structural adjustment stuff on the nose following those protests and also seeing the actual consequences of those policies in the real world. I never hear anyone in african or asian politics mention that they're paying back big IMF loans or that either of those institutions are interfering too much in domestic spending (etc) policy. I don't know though, maybe it's just a blind spot for me.

As a further tangent, those anti-globalization protests were a big deal for me as well, the first political thing I was ever interested in, probably was interested in that before I knew what the labour party even was. They look like such an oddity in retrospect. Not so much in form, but in the content of the rhetoric and it being a broadly left group of people.
 
Top