Beyond the human body: Claire Denis's ecologies
Loading...
Files
Published Version
Date
2014
Authors
McMahon, Laura
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Film and Screen Media, University College Cork
Published Version
Abstract
This article explores the work of Claire Denis beyond the focus on the human body through which it is commonly read. Addressing Beau Travail (1999) and The Intruder (2004), I examine an ecological impulse that manifests itself through a nonanthropocentric detailing of the coexistence of body and landscape, and a nonhierarchical attentiveness to the distributed agencies of humans, animals and things. I draw here in particular on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image and on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of ecotechnics, as elaborated in his essay on The Intruder (a film inspired by Nancy’s autobiographical essay, L’Intrus). In Beau Travail, Deleuzian crystals of time draw attention to the nonhuman histories of the landscape. In The Intruder, this crystalline structure persists, reactivating traces of nonhuman pasts, while a focus on canine gestures and responses signals nonhuman perceptual worlds in the present. Deleuze’s “Desert Islands”, another text that shapes The Intruder, offers a further way of reading the film’s attentiveness to the nonhuman—an attentiveness that extends, as Nancy suggests, to a consideration of environmental crisis.
Description
Keywords
Nonhuman , Environmental crisis , Beau Travail , The Intruder , Body , Landscape , Gilles Deleuze , Crystal-image , Jean-Luc Nancy , Ecotechnics
Citation
McMahon, L. (2014) 'Beyond the human body: Claire Denis's ecologies', Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 7. https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.7.06