Claire Denis, the filmmaker in the canon who still wants to do better

Claire Denis

Photo: Elena Ternovaja / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 21, 1946 Paris, France
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Beau Travail, High Life, White Material
Awards	Golden Leopard, Locarno Film Festival · Silver Bear · Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival (shared) · Carrosse d'Or, Société des réalisatrices et réalisateurs de films · Stockholm (lifetime achievement)

When the Collège de France created a chair for cinema, its first guest was Claire Denis, and she gave her inaugural lecture a title of two words: “Faire mieux”. Do better. It is an odd motto for a director whose Beau Travail sits seventh in the critics’ list of the greatest films ever made, in the company of Vertigo and Tokyo Story. It is also an accurate summary of her career: Denis has never treated the canon as a place to stop. Every film since has tried to get somewhere else, and the detours have run from cannibal horror to a prison ship falling towards a black hole.

The outsider’s angle came early. Her father was a French colonial civil servant who moved the family every couple of years so that his daughters would learn geography, and Denis, though born in Paris, grew up in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Senegal and French Somaliland, today’s Djibouti. At twelve she contracted polio and was sent back to France for treatment, and she spent her adolescence in Sceaux, outside Paris, feeling that she had been raised for a life in Africa and fitted nowhere else.

After a false start in economics, which she later called “completely suicidal”, Denis, born on 21 April 1946, entered the IDHEC film school in Paris in 1969. There she met Agnès Godard, who would go on to operate the camera or light most of her films. Through the 1970s and 1980s she worked as an assistant director for Jacques Rivette and Costa-Gavras, and crossed to America for Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire and for Jim Jarmusch on Down by Law. Wenders said later that it would have been a waste to let her go on as an assistant.

Chocolat, her first feature, returned to Cameroon in 1988 through the memory of a French woman revisiting the house where she grew up and the African servant who had been closest to her, played by Isaach de Bankolé. It competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for the César for best first film. It also began her partnership with the co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau. The Paris films that followed, I Can’t Sleep, drawn from a real case of a man who killed elderly women, and Nénette and Boni, winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 1996, showed her finding the hard face of contemporary France in bodies rather than speeches.

Then, in 1999, came Beau Travail. Denis moved Herman Melville‘s Billy Budd to a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti and turned a story of envy between soldiers into a study of drilled male bodies under a white sun, with Denis Lavant as a sergeant eaten by resentment of a young recruit. Her habit of shooting fast and editing slowly decided its most famous scene: the solitary dance that closes the film sat elsewhere in the script, and she moved it to the end in the cutting room. In 2022 the Sight and Sound critics’ poll put it seventh of all time, one of the first two films by women, with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, to reach that top ten.

What came next frustrated anyone hoping for a second Beau Travail. Trouble Every Day, in 2001, was a horror film about desire curdling into cannibalism, with Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle, and after the first scripted bite she let the actors play the two killings as they wished. 35 Shots of Rum borrowed the frame of Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring for a father and daughter in Paris. White Material, written with Marie NDiaye, left Isabelle Huppert on a coffee plantation in an unnamed African country sliding into civil war. “For me, the monster is invisible,” Denis has said of the thread running through all of it. “Evil is never the other, everything is inside and never outside.”

The harder argument concerns her last decade. High Life, her first feature in English, put Robert Pattinson on a spaceship of convicts drifting towards a black hole with a baby in his arms, and won over many critics when A24 released it in America. Let the Sunshine In, and Both Sides of the Blade, both starring Juliette Binoche, kept her working in French; the second won her the Silver Bear for best director in Berlin in 2022. But the English-language work has split her critics more than anything since Trouble Every Day. Stars at Noon, from Denis Johnson’s novel, lost two male leads before shooting began, and when it shared the Grand Prix at Cannes that same year with Lukas Dhont’s Close, The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called it “a major misfire”. Her defenders answer that consensus was never the point: Denis has called film theory “a pain in the ass” and says she is not sure films should be made to soothe anyone’s pain. Her detractors reply that the reverence around Beau Travail lets admirers hear every stumble as a risk. What the record shows is a director who will not remake the film that made her safe.

The Fence brought her back to Africa for the third time. Adapted from Bernard-Marie Koltès’s play Black Battles with Dogs and written with Suzanne Lindon and Andrew Litvack, it sets Isaach de Bankolé, as a man demanding the body of his dead brother, against Matt Dillon’s foreman on a construction site. Shot in Senegal early in 2025, it premiered at Toronto that September and opened in French cinemas as Le Cri des gardes on 8 April 2026, to reviews that Metacritic files as mixed. A month later the French directors’ guild, the SRF, handed her its Carrosse d’Or at the opening of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. In September she took Avec Kim to the Venice Days section: a short for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, almost without dialogue, in which Suzanne Lindon drives across Paris to meet Kim Gordon, who also composed the music.

This autumn Denis turns teacher first. Her lecture at the Collège de France is set for 29 October 2026, and her course there runs from 2 November to 4 January 2027 under the title “Sortir de cette chambre à moi, chanceler, chavirer”. After that, the plan is a feature called The Soap Maker, an English-language crime drama written with Litvack and inspired by Leonarda Cianciulli, who murdered three women in the Italian town of Correggio around 1940 and made soap and cakes from their remains. A quarter of a century after Trouble Every Day, the director the canon keeps filing under one film is heading back to the hunger that once made her so hard to file.