French Filmmaker Denis Gets Frank

A man in Manhattan asks his French girlfriend to come live with him. She arrives at his empty apartment to await his return. Another man, framed for stealing a car, suddenly flings himself into the apartment. Through the cold heat of silence, these two strangers embrace on a lonely mattress. In the morning, the two lovers glide through the city lip-locked, ordering chicken and blueberry muffins for breakfast. In the last shot, a tow truck carrying the stolen car glides past them in the street. All this culminates under the lull of John Lurie’s syncopated voice.

This is the premise of “Keep It For Yourself,” a stunning film by French director Claire Denis. Originally made as an extended commercial for a Japanese car that was never released, the film was shown at the Harvard Film Archive on Nov. 7 and 8 as part of a retrospective honoring Denis, who spoke at both screenings. While the premise sounds implausible, she renders this scenario completely real, as she does in all her films. She assembles a collage of circumstantial details that, when brought together in light, image, and sound, seems to express everything you feel but never could articulate.

Denis did not grow up wanting to be a filmmaker. As the daughter of colonial officials, she spent the majority of her childhood moving through various outposts in French colonial Africa, including Cameroon and Djibouti. Her first encounter with cinema came when she was a college student in Paris, where Denis immediately fell in love with the medium. She did not start making films until years later when she realized she could do nothing else. Denis began working as an assistant director on the sets of both Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch.

“I was unfit for life, basically,” Denis said in an interview. “And I think cinema was sort of a second life. It was another way to be in contact with my life as an adult, as a woman, more than through my family or through my school. And, somehow, feeling unfit, I had the impression that I could not be only a film-watcher.”

Much of Denis’ work is informed by the time she spent in Africa. Her first feature film, “Chocolat” (not to be confused with the more recent “Chocolat” starring Juliette Binoche), is set in post-colonial Cameroon and centers on a French colonialist’s daughter, who must make sense of the uneven racial landscape. “Beau Travail,” which won Denis global acclaim and various awards at a number of prestigious film festivals, is the poetic recollection of a former Foreign Legion officer in Djibouti. Based on Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd,” and set to Benjamin Britten’s opera of the same title, “Beau Travail” is no traditional war film. Scenes of the legionnaires, from training to doing laundry, are punctuated with dance sequences in a local nightclub. These competing rhythms form the pulse of the film, presenting Denis’ complex aesthetic.

After “Beau Travail,” Denis went on to make “Trouble Every Day,” perhaps her most provocative and controversial film. A spin-off of the vampire genre—where the cliché of sucking blood translates into extreme sexual situations and desire leads to destruction—the film boasts ten times more blood (and sex) than “Carrie.” Denis’s next film, “Friday Night,” documents a one-night stand. It’s 90 minutes of the most frustrating, captivating sexual tension imaginable.

“There is no filmmaking without sex or attraction or desire because film is really made of that—of this attraction, repulsion, fear,” Denis said. “Even fear and blood and guns—all this is sexual in film. The fluid of cinema is sexuality.”

Like her films, Denis is rebellious. Though she is one of few female directors of our time, collaborating consistently with female cinematographer Agnès Godard, Denis rejects the notion of a uniquely female gaze—a term dubbed in film theory as the artistic product of a woman behind the camera. In fact, she rejects the notion of “the gaze” altogether.

“The gaze is a decision. It’s not a gender. It’s a little disgusting to accept the female gaze,” Denis said. She does, however, wrestle with what it means to be a female behind the camera, especially when it comes to her approach to making a film.

“You don’t need to be very tough and strong to make films,” Denis said. “But, in asking myself if my way of starting a script is feminine, sometimes I feel it and I don’t know why. As if something in me was slightly refusing too much fiction. Maybe this is feminine? I don’t know. This is a question I’m asking myself.”

Denis is currently in production for her new film, “White Material,” shot in Cameroon and starring legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert. Despite the prestige that Huppert’s name lends to the project, Denis refuses to see her career as a progression.

“I never imagined there would be a progression. I imagined there would be a regression. Progression—this is not an idea that is active in me,” she said. But in her characteristic reconstructive fashion, Denis modifies her statement. “Maybe—if progression meant an exploration underground so you don’t know where you are, and it becomes too narrow, so you step back.”