‘A lover's hand? A breath, An abyss’: Aloneness in Claire Denis

Sloane, Peter (2023) ‘A lover's hand? A breath, An abyss’: Aloneness in Claire Denis. In: ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis. ReFocus: The International Directors Series . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. ISBN Paperback: 9781399511216 Hardback: 9781399511209 Ebook (PDF): 9781399511223

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Abstract

In readings of Beau Travail (1999), L’Intrus (2004), White Material (2009) and High Life (2018), films which feature aggressively solitary figures, I suggest that, for Denis, aloneness is often the result of, even a price paid willingly for, a passion or obsession which goes beyond that for companionship, love, family, or community. Her protagonists are usually already in enclaves (colonial, penal, military) which are themselves typified by facultative difference from their enclosing wider social settings. As Judith Mayne writes, all kinds of ‘Strangers populate the films of Claire Denis […] exiles who live sometimes on the margins, sometimes in the shifting spaces of the geographies of race and gender and colonization’ (2005: 80). These strangers with whom we become so fleetingly familiar in these brief but intense encounters are often intrusive foreign bodies, outcasts on distant outposts or islands, whether figurative or literal. It is not, however, the simple fact of their strangeness which marks them as remarkable, but the fact that they strive to perfect their sequestration within these stratified concentric spaces. In this sense, the films are not about the lonely, isolated, excluded or marginalised, but about the profoundly and voluntarily ontologically apart. Here, I focus on the forceful figures at the (faltering) heart of their often-solipsistic narratives; the landscapes which frame, enforce, symbolise their isolations; the fleeting moments of intimacy which temporarily irrupt within and offer ultimately illusory or unsatisfying alternatives to their aloneness; and finally, the ways in which each film witnesses its precarious subject in a moment of things – life, colony, humanity, comradery –collapsing. I want also to think through the significance of motion and stasis, velocity and inertia (‘are we rushing forward, are we standing still?’ as Robert Pattinson croons questioningly in Staples’ High Life soundtrack), the delicately balanced torsional forces between which play such a crucial role for Denis’s characters. Regardless of the shifting contexts and the ostensibly different lives portrayed, Denis’s films are united by an almost pathological idio-alienation which proves, ultimately, to be fatal.

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