Overview

Beau Travail (1998) is Claire Denis' bold, sensuous masterpiece. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), the film explores the complexities of desire, identity, and power within an all-male group of French Foreign Legionnaires stationed at a coastal outpost in the former colony of Djibouti, in East Africa. The film cemented Denis' position as a leading auteur and visual poet. In this book, Corinn Columpar positions the film as a cinematic bid for freedom. She examines its formal innovations - particularly the use of the gaze, voice, and movement - to explain how Denis produces exhilarating possibilities narratively, affectively, and ideologically, while also situating the film within the histories of art cinema and postcolonial filmmaking.

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9781839027130

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Author Information

Corinn Columpar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (2010). She is co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (2009) and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor (2022). She has published widely on feminist film theory, embodiment and representation in journals including Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Women Studies Quarterly.

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