Abstract

In readings of Beau Travail (1999), L’Intrus (2004), White Material (2009) and High Life (2018), films which feature aggressively solitary figures, I suggest that, for Denis, aloneness is often the result of, even a price paid willingly for, a passion or obsession which goes beyond that for companionship, love, family, or community. Her protagonists are usually already in enclaves (colonial, penal, military) which are themselves typified by facultative difference from their enclosing wider social settings. As Judith Mayne writes, all kinds of ‘Strangers populate the films of Claire Denis […] exiles who live sometimes on the margins, sometimes in the shifting spaces of the geographies of race and gender and colonization’ (2005: 80).