Claire Denis

"Claire Denis has created an impressive body of work that ranges from narrative features and music documentaries to films for television. Known worldwide as an inspired director with a vivacious, trenchant perspective, she has been called "one of the greatest directors of our time," and enjoys a reputation as an extraordinarily inventive and influential independent filmmaker." - Cynthia Felando (The St. James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia, 1999)
Claire Denis
Director / Screenwriter
(1946- ) Born April 21, Paris, France
Top 250 Directors / 21st Century's Top 100 Directors

Key Production Countries: France, Germany
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Romance, Family Drama, Slice of Life, Urban Drama
Key Collaborators: Agnès Godard (Cinematographer), Jean-Pol Fargeau (Screenwriter), Alex Descas (Leading Character Actor), Arnaud de Moleron (Production Designer), Grégoire Colin (Leading Actor), Nelly Quettier (Editor), Guy Lecorne (Editor), Michel Subor (Leading Character Actor), Nicolas Duvauchelle (Leading Character Actor), Florence Loiret Caille (Leading Character Actress), Tindersticks/Stuart Staples (Composer), Isaach De Bankolé (Leading Actor)

"A white liberal director who spent her formative years living in colonial Africa, Claire Denis is one of the most original and daring directors to emerge from France. What she seems to be attempting, and frequently achieving, is a phenomenological, almost existential, cinema. Her ambition is, in her words, "to capture moments... pieces of time." There is an almost anthropological interest in minutiae - gestures, faces, surfaces - as her camera zeroes in and lingers long on pinpoint details. Denis self-deprecatingly puts her meditative style down to the fact that she is a "a bit slow." - Lloyd Hughes (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)
"So its clear, I think, how far certain running ideas in French cinema - evident in the thirties and hurried forward in the New Wave - are still being pursued. Claire Denis reminds one not just of the wonder of French cinema, but of its sense of history." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
Beau travail
Beau travail (1999)
"A provocative director whose films offer richly textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema's most distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current French directors who "has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France."" - Rebecca Flint Marx (All-Movie Guide)
"Aside from their striking visual quality and formal dexterity, Denis' films exude tender affection for, and solidarity with, a range of everyday people – exiles, immigrants, sexual transgressives and alienated urban dwellers – who thrive on the margins of society. At the same time, much of her work questions the self-serving assumptions and prejudices of the dominant white European culture." - Damon Smith (Senses of Cinema, 2005)
"Her films are not exquisite compositions for cinematic beauty's sake; few directors take you so directly within a character's subjectivity, and Denis does it with imagistic tactility rather than over psychology." - Heidi Bollich (501 Movie Directors, 2007)
"What distinguishes Denis's films is their lack of explanation or prescription; where other directors might be afraid of confusing or losing their audience, Denis holds her nerve, and lets the action and characters slowly unfold. The result is mesmeric. She isn't interested in political messages; she lets the emotions speak for themselves." - Kira Cochrane (The Guardian, 2009)
"Far more than her predecessors and early collaborators, Denis views cinema as a means to record and not to interpret, to allow her subjects expression and especially presence to speak for themselves without overt narration. Whatever the influence—direct or indirect—of Denis's predecessors upon her work, the bold narrative and visual style she has deployed in all of her films since Chocolat suggest that hers is not, in Harold Bloom's term, an anxiety of influence, so much as a building upon, an extension of." - Leo Goldsmith (Reverse Shot)
"If filming means you have to control everything I'd shoot myself. You already have to control the framing, the colors, the costumes, the sets and all that. But that's done before, the control's done before. What I like during filming is that these are moments when you have the right not to reply and to let things happen. Before the shoot, after the shoot, you have to account for everything." - Claire Denis
Selected Filmography
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GF Greatest Films ranking ( Top 1000 ● Top 2500)
21C 21st Century ranking ( Top 1000)
T TSPDT R Jonathan Rosenbaum
Claire Denis / Favourite Films
La Bête humaine (1938) Jean Renoir, The Birth of Love (1993) Philippe Garrel, La Chienne (1931) Jean Renoir, Cockfighter (1974) Monte Hellman, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996) Hong Sang-soo, Fear Eats the Soul (1974) Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) Nagisa Oshima, Le Petit Soldat (1960) Jean-Luc Godard, Le Pont du Nord (1981) Jacques Rivette, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) Melvin Van Peebles, Tabu (1931) F.W. Murnau, Winter's Child (1989) Olivier Assayas.
Source: Austrian Film Museum (2005)
Claire Denis / Fan Club
David Jenkins, Guy Lodge, Robbie Collin, Wendy Ide, Cristina Nord, Dennis Schwartz, Adam Nayman, Kiva Reardon, Kent Jones, Jonathan Romney, Tricia Tuttle, Vinícius Reis.
Nenette et Boni