TSPDT

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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"No one makes movies like Claire Denis, one of contemporary cinema’s foremost masters. Raised in colonial West Africa, Denis apprenticed as an assistant to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders before striking out on her own in the late eighties in an entirely original cinematic language shaped by her outsider’s perspective. Atmospheric, elliptical, and hypnotically absorbing, her films unfold as sensuous washes of sound and image that manage to balance intimate human stories with weighty themes of postcolonial tension, modern alienation, and the boundless complexities of love and sex." - The Criterion Collection

"Driven by a compulsion to probe into some of the most mysterious corners of the human experience, her films begin where platitudes and commonplace ideas end, where words fail and the truly cinematic begins." - Elena Lazic (BFI, 2022)

"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