You are exposed to a culture, a way of life, an ambience." But she is quick to add that there is no age barrier to responding to Ray's masterful trilogy. "The Apu Trilogy," says Denis, "apart from being a massive piece of cinema represents a good way for a child to see a film and experience another world. "I saw Pather Panchali at the age of nine," she says. The Apu Trilogy, which catapulted Satyajit Ray to global prominence in the 1950s, remains one of her principal creative inspirations. One of her most loved film, 35 Shots Of Rum, a drama about a a father and daughter in an immigrant community in Paris, was inspired in part by Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring. She cut her teeth as a filmmaker assisting Jacques Rivette (her favourite French director), Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Costa-Gavras. In 1999, she made one of her most acclaimed films, Beau Travail, loosely based on Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd and set among a band of men of the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti.ĭenis lived in West Africa with her parents and younger sister before returning to Paris aged 14 and going on to study at the French national film school. But am I strong enough to fight a world that is becoming increasingly closed? I am not sure."ĭenis' first feature, Chocolat (1988), told a semi-autobiographical story of a French family living in Cameroon that probes class and racial divides. In a virtual conversation a day after a Masterclass at Qumra 2021, the Doha Film Institute's annual Arab cinema incubation event - being held online this year - Denis asserts: "I try my best to make the films that I want to. She is, however, loath to arrogate to herself any special clutter-breaker status. With frequent collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau, Denis, besides addressing wide-ranging themes with tenderness and unwavering, unsettling integrity, has also written strong female characters, notably for Isabelle Huppert ( White Material) and Juliette Binoche ( Let the Sunshine In, High Life and the upcoming Fire). In Denis' cinema, textures, sounds, spatial compositions, colours and psychological layers are as important as words and gestures in conveying meaning as she tackles post-colonial guilt, complexities of human relationships and the nature of desire. The concerns of the 74-year-old Paris-based director are coloured by a breadth of vision engendered by her growing-up years in a slew of African countries, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Senegal. The acuity of her art hinges as much on precision of craft as on depth of imagination. Victor Banerjee plays a professor in Claire Denis' 'High Life'Ĭlaire Denis, one of contemporary French cinema's most uncompromising auteurs, portrays the lives of the marginalised - exiles, immigrants, alienated individuals, people holding out against advancing darkness - in a strikingly original and deeply affecting manner."I cried and cried," Claire Denis on 'Pather Panchali'.His mother (the marvellous Karuna Bannerjee) is mired in daily tasks – looking after Apu and his sister Durga, struggling with the demands of her ageing sister-in-law and her impractical husband. His father, a priest lost in dreams of writing plays and poetry, is so weak he won't even ask his employer for his back-pay. A small boy, Apu (Subir Bannergee), is living with his impoverished Brahmin family in rural west Bengal. The story seems superficially insubstantial. Certainly director Satyajit Ray and cinematographer Subrata Mitra showed a miraculous gift for lighting scenes, coaxing intimate and utterly convincing performances from children and other non-professional actors, and allowing narrative to grow seamlessly – just as happened in the best of the films by Ray's western mentor, Jean Renoir. Perhaps this inexperience gave everyone involved the freedom to create something new. On the first day of the shoot, the director had never directed, the cameraman had never shot a scene, the children in the leading roles hadn't been tested and the soundtrack was composed by a then obscure sitarist (the great Ravi Shankar). I t was the birth of a cinema, certainly the birth of a new kind of Indian cinema.
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