Kirjahaku

Widely regarded as one of the most innovative and passionate filmmakers working in France today, Claire Denis has continued to make beautiful and challenging films since the 1988 release of her first feature, Chocolat. Judith Mayne's comprehensive study traces Denis's career and discusses her major feature films in rich detail. Born in Paris but raised in West Africa, Denis explores in her films the legacies of French colonialism and the complex relationships between sexuality, gender, and race. From the adult woman who observes her past as a child in Cameroon to the Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in Paris and watches a serial killer to the disgraced French Foreign Legionnaire attempting to make sense of his past, the subjects of Denis's films continually revisit themes of watching, bearing witness, and making contact, as well as displacement, masculinity, and the migratory subject.

Claire Denis is one of France's most acclaimed and original filmmakers. Since her remarkable debut success with 'Chocolat' (1986), she has produced an impressive series of features which have been intriguing, visually striking, and often highly controversial (including 'Beau Travail' (2000) and 'Trouble Every Day' (2001)). Beugnet provides a thematic and stylistic framework within which to consider Denis' work, as well as a comprehensive analysis of individual films. She highlights the resonance of Denis' films in relation to ongoing debates about French national identity and culture, and issues of postcolonial identity, alienation and transgression, as well as examining their exploration of the interface between sexuality, desire and sensuality. This is an essential introduction to Denis, and a sophisticated and illuminating study of her work to date.

Updates and reapplies film theory to French director Claire Denis's films, with a particular focus on her most recent work Features essays on all of Denis's fiction and documentary World leading Denis scholars Innovative readings of Denis in the 21st Century ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis comprises 14 original works of criticism from world leading Denis scholars and early career researchers. With contributors from as far afield as Canada and Australia, the collection offers a global perspective on Denis' films. It includes an accessible introduction for those new to Denis studies, providing biographical details, an overview of thematic interests, and a brief survey of the most salient and influential trends in Denis scholarship. The first collection of scholarly essays on Denis, and the first major work of criticism on one of the contemporary period's most influential and renowned directors for almost a decade, ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis is a timely and important contribution to Denis studies and to transnational cinema studies more broadly.

ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis comprises 14 original works of criticism from world leading Denis scholars and early career researchers.With contributors from as far afield as Canada and Australia, the collection offers a global perspective on Denis' films. It includes an accessible introduction for those new to Denis studies, providing biographical details, an overview of thematic interests, and a brief survey of the most salient and influential trends in Denis scholarship. The first collection of scholarly essays on Denis, and the first major work of criticism on one of the contemporary period's most influential and renowned directors for almost a decade, ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis is a timely and important contribution to Denis studies and to transnational cinema studies more broadly.

The films of Claire Denis probe the idea of global citizenship and trace the borderlines of family, desire, nationality and power. Her films, including Chocolat, Beau travail and White Material explore connections between national experience and individual circumstance, visualizing the complications of such dualities. Following a foreword by Wim Wenders, international contributors explore the themes she addresses in her films, such as kinship and landscape, neo-colonialism and New French Extremity. Original interviews with an editor, actor and two composers familiar with Denis's working style and with Denis herself, also reveal fresh facets of this intrepid filmmaker.

In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of the first such procedures in France, a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. Numerous complications followed, including more surgeries and lymphatic cancer. The procedure and illnesses he endured revealed to him, in a more visceral way than most of us ever experience, the strangeness of bodily existence itself and surviving the stranger within him. During this same period, Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and poverty. Alarmed at this trend and drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years, Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion—whether of a body or a border—is not antithetical to one's identity but constitutive of it. In 2004, Claire Denis adapted The Intruder into a film already hailed among the most important of our century. This edition includes Nancy's and Denis's accounts of turning philosophy into film and the text of a shorter collaboration between the two of them. Throughout, Nancy and Denis push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity.

In 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy's heart gave out. In one of the first such procedures in France, a stranger's heart was grafted into his body. Numerous complications followed, including more surgeries and lymphatic cancer. The procedure and illnesses he endured revealed to him, in a more visceral way than most of us ever experience, the strangeness of bodily existence itself and surviving the stranger within him. During this same period, Europe began closing its borders to those seeking refuge from war and poverty. Alarmed at this trend and drawn to a highly intimate form of strangeness with which he had been living for years, Nancy set out in The Intruder to articulate how intrusion—whether of a body or a border—is not antithetical to one's identity but constitutive of it. In 2004, Claire Denis adapted The Intruder into a film already hailed among the most important of our century. This edition includes Nancy's and Denis's accounts of turning philosophy into film and the text of a shorter collaboration between the two of them. Throughout, Nancy and Denis push us to recognize that to truly welcome strangers means a constant struggle against exoticism, enforced assimilation, and confidence in our own self-identity.