Claire Denis

[criterionsnob]

After noticing their logo on the Criterion Channel stream, I emailed Cinema Guild and got this response:

Thanks for getting in touch. Yes, we are plan to release 35 Shots of Rum on Blu-ray this year. We will announce once we have more details about the release.

[TheKieslowskiHaze]

After noticing their logo on the Criterion Channel stream, I emailed Cinema Guild and got this response:

Thanks for getting in touch. Yes, we are plan to release 35 Shots of Rum on Blu-ray this year. We will announce once we have more details about the release.

Awesome. I just watched this on the channel last night and was pretty blown away. I'd love to see more Denis (L'intrus!) get quality physical releases.

[GoodOldNeon]

35 rhums is the film of the month on the ARTE Cinema YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNsvaB0xQC0

[therewillbeblus]

So I've finished off my blind spots of Denis' features and revisited a couple, and still predominantly find myself in the 'like, not love' camp, so it was to my surprise how floored I was by U.S. Go Home. It's a testament to Denis' range how opposing but no less poetic this is to her elliptical masterpiece, L'Intrus. Instead of obfuscating narrative, temporal, or, well any, holds on the happenings, U.S. Go Home is a stripped-down, intimately layered meditation on youthful preoccupation and multisensory experience in the vein of Fucking Amal, The Myth of the American Sleepover, Les Bonnes Femmes etc., with the latter's blend between delightfully earnest self-conscious yearning and titillating risk captivating every sense I use to engage with cinema, just as its central principal's senses are pulsating as she takes in the intoxicating aura of her immediate surroundings. What an arousing hour- a perfect film.

It's funny how my other favorite Denis' are the similarly simplified 24-hr narrative Friday Night and the aloof and chaotic Both Sides of the Blade, the latter of which fits more in line with L'Intrus in its dense ambitions, and the former aligning with U.S. Go Home's urgent attention to the sublime. Denis often administers restraint but is also typically blunt about her thematic goals, though I find those latter two a bit more confounding and mature in regards to her aims, whereas the love films are emblems of lyrical bliss yet no less adult in their own ways.

[Matt]

Friday Night is an incredible film. I wish I knew what I could do to help free it from the clutches of Fox Lorber. It seems like Metrograph managed to do that for L’intrus only to lock it up again on their exclusive streaming platform.

[therewillbeblus]

Agreed, it was far and away my favorite until this recent revisit of L'Intrus proved greater returns, and I had more time to reflect on Both Sides of the Blade, which I'm more convinced than ever is Denis' most complex and alienating work, one-upping Antonioni to the point of disgust. Friday Night is still second, behind U.S. Go Home though, just not the only Denis I flat-out love anymore.

Also, after finally getting to her two postcolonial meditations following the underwhelming Chocolat, and liking them a lot more than I expected to, I feel like I owe that first film a rewatch since it's the only Denis I'm currently apathetic towards.

[Persona]

Glad to see the growing appreciation for L'Intrus in here. I am not sure why that film feels so overlooked in Denis' oeuvre. Hits on an obscure register that so many other arthouse films attempt but often miss.

[therewillbeblus]

Le 15 Mai finally got English subs on backchannels, and it seems that right from her first feature, Denis was deconstructing genre into the empathic spaces of raw human vulnerability, yet resisting a surrogate blending by keeping our vantage point at an observant distance. Here it's the sci-fi genre, in what at first appears to be a Twilight Zone episodic rendition of Groundhog Day's premise mixed with the social alienation of melodrama, an individual trapped by skewed and irreconcilable isolated subjectivity. This kind of idea is probably best engaged with in the 30-minute duration of Denis' film, which ostensibly doesn't have ambitions to run the scope of a Happy Death Day's exercise incorporating horror related to trauma that necessitates breathing room, or Palm Spring' collectivist love story cultivated over repetition breaking down individualistic wills, etc. Instead, we experience the reality of acute anger, WebMD-equivalent obsessive self-diagnosing, derealization, and other sharp responses from a quarantining crisis of individualized reality- something I find terrifying. Sadly the film doesn't bask in this enigmatic space that would go on to define Denis' elliptical work to come, and defaults hard into a Twilight Zone reveal that elicits a similar kind of unsettling horror in identity destruction, but through abolishing the discomfort of reality-testing via receiving answers (versus, something like Upstream Color, for instance, which makes us stew in the hazy unknown with its principals). I feel like Denis read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (though I'm aware it's actually "The Tunnel under the World," the Blade Runner connections are uncanny) and decided to do something different with it, and then went and ended her film without any of the rich subtext she grazed for twenty minutes prior. Oh well, still a treat, and a fine student film

[Peacock]

I’m loving the discussion here but now I’m curious: what do ya’ll think about No Fear, No Die?

[therewillbeblus]

I'd probably give it the edge over J'ai pas sommeil (which I also liked) in terms of Denis' postcolonial works following Chocolat's more direct engagement with the ideas. It's a particularly effective look at how individuals function within physical and metaphysical spaces under social contracts, as the two dark-skinned immigrants take opposing approaches, either falling into complacent rhythms or try to flex the boundaries of their agency within these systems. The cockfighting milieu was an interesting allegorical vehicle with many opportunities to evoke both cognitive parallels and sensational responses, certainly compared to J'ai pas sommeil's serial killer plot with immigrants' alienation at the forefront.

[senseabove]

A 4k restoration of No Fear No Die is among the titles in this year's NYFF Revivals:

Restored in 4K by Pathé in 2022 with the help of the French National Center of Film and Motions Pictures (CNC) at Hiventy Laboratory.

[hedge]

Hopefully we're going to see a decent chunk of her filmography on Blu-ray soonish.

Confirmed restorations of:
Chocolat (via Claire Denis' Instagram)
No Fear, No Die (4K restoration screened at NYFF)
Trouble Every Day (already on Blu-ray in Germany from a 4K restoration)
The Intruder (if Metrograph are still planning to do it)

Also, Blu-ray's of 35 Shots of Rum, Both Sides of the Blade and (maybe) Stars at Noon.

Would love to see Friday Night and US Go Home restored.

[therewillbeblus]

Would love to see Friday Night and US Go Home restored.

Those and Bastards are her best works, so yeah, bring those ones on

[hearthesilence]

Le Cinéma Club recently streamed Claire Denis’ only film made in America, the long-thought-lost 1991 film Keep It for Yourself, which had been commissioned as one third of an omnibus feature showcasing the Figaro, a retro design Japanese car.

In hindsight, I wonder if the original film reels were in DuArt's possession as they're listed in the credits - DuArt was clearing out their vaults about ten years ago, and supposedly it was pretty haphazard as to whether the owners of the films in their possession were contacted or not. Regardless, Le Cinéma Club apparently found someone selling a Japanese-subtitled VHS copy on eBay, and it's the only screenable copy of the film known to exist.

Roxy Cinema just screened it with Sara Driver's You Are Not I as part of their ongoing retrospective of her work (Driver appears in the film) and it looks like someone found a way to download the video from Le Cinéma Club's website and save it for posterity.

[pianocrash]

Snipped from the S&S thread:

Regarding S'en Fout La Mort, this is the original post from "jeromezone" that I referred to:

I worked on this film as an extra and it was a pleasure to meet the fantastic talent in the film. Isaach was a delight and it was great to meet the late, great Jean-Claude Brialy, who had us often in stitches during the breaks. But the sheer brilliance of watching Ms. Denis at work was unforgettable. I would also like to point out that the cockfights in the film look very real but in filming them it was executed so well that no harm was ever done to any animals. It took many, many hours of shooting and many takes to make it look real - and lots of fake blood. Of course they were put into the ring and they hopped around on each other and began to get aggressive but then it would be stopped. Thus the words "no animals were harmed during the making of this film" is true. It was important to show that this type of thing was going on at the time (many people didn't believe it), and how brutal it was.

Pathé 4K Resto French R2 BD/DVD combo will be released on June 28, 2023 - stoked!

[criterionsnob]

Wow! Probably without English subtitles, but must be coming soon in an English friendly edition too.

[criterionsnob]

Claire Denis "...will be returning to Cameroon later this month to scout for locations for her next project, which she finished writing last week."

[dadaistnun]

Wow! Probably without English subtitles, but must be coming soon in an English friendly edition too.

Turns out there are English subtitles.

Available from Fnac.

[Matt]

Speaking of No Fear No Die, I happened to be at my small town’s Vintage Band Festival (brass bands, mariachi, etc.) this weekend and, after finishing a rousingly jazzed up rendition of the theme from The Third Man, a brass band introduced their next number as “the theme from a Claire Denis” film. I thought I misheard, but there followed Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Calypso Minor.” Never in my life would I have considered…

[criterionsnob]

Wow! Probably without English subtitles, but must be coming soon in an English friendly edition too.

Turns out there are English subtitles.

Available from Fnac.

Ordered! I don't mind buying this multiple times, if it gets released in North America. Never thought this film would ever get released in a quality edition.

[criterionsnob]

Speaking of No Fear No Die, I happened to be at my small town’s Vintage Band Festival (brass bands, mariachi, etc.) this weekend and, after finishing a rousingly jazzed up rendition of the theme from The Third Man, a brass band introduced their next number as “the theme from a Claire Denis” film. I thought I misheard, but there followed Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Calypso Minor.” Never in my life would I have considered…

Thanks, I didn't know the No Fear, No Die soundtrack was even available. I've added it to my streaming library. The Tindersticks Claire Denis Films Scores vinyl box set is fabulous, and I love cooking while listening to the Stars at Noon soundtrack. So jazzy!

[criterionsnob]

Another Claire Denis film potentially in the pipeline. Claire Denis Eyes Crime Drama The Soap Maker.

[hearthesilence]

I didn't realize Matt Dillon was going to be in Denis's upcoming film, but he posted a photo a week ago on-location of him, Denis and Isaach de Bankolé. (He's got several other posts of photos taken around Senegal.)

[black&huge]

I thought for some reason it was Matt Damon and for a second was very impressed he was filming a new Denis film concurrently with The Odyssey