In the films of Claire Denis, the sublime has one source: the moments of daily life that, while heavy with significance, pass by unnoticed by those who witness them. In the words of the director, this dimension of an unspoken interior life is as powerful as fate. Its accumulation over time defines us as individuals with infinitely specific portfolios of emotions and sensibilities. Its poetic force, unique to each person, is what fuels human experience. It is this — the inexpressible personal universe that Denis imagines and creates for her characters, translated into the language of cinema — that explains her mastery. Or better, demonstrates it — given that her body of work has as little need for explanations as it does for narratives.

The characters in Claire Denis’s films, dogged by feelings of desire, fear or rejection, are all looking for something from life without knowing if they will ever find it. From Protée, in Chocolat, to Camille in J’ai pas sommeil, and Maria Vial in White Material, we can identify a common theme: historical and societal forces permeate their lives, social norms dictate what is expected from them, and it is their age, social status, ethnicity, nationality or sexuality that dictates their position as outsiders, as strangers. In films that are regularly described as focussed on the margins, this sense of disquiet is physical, mental, geographical and existential, often simultaneously. Whether in the suburbs of Paris (S’en fout la mort), in the Gulf of Djibouti (Beau travail), on a spaceship (High Life), or in the heat of Nicaragua (Stars at Noon), we follow stories that carry within them a feeling of separation and exile. Characters rarely find a source of comfort in the places they live in, following paths driven only by their emotions, their identities, their own personal truths. This is a cinema of belief. Denis, when faced with characters who constantly transgress norms, chooses to stand in solidarity with them, to confer on them visibility, and to believe that they will yet have a chance to obtain what they are seeking, or find redemption from the darkest things within them.

Focussed as she is on the essential — the catalysing force of emotions — to the detriment of linear narrative arcs, Denis uses the bodies of the actors with whom she loyally works as a vehicle for her own profoundly sensorial and poetic vision of the world. This intimate way of working, an indispensable part of her process, depends on nothing less than a mutual understanding, a kind of reciprocal intellectual seduction between the two parties. It is around these bodies, these emotional bodies, that she weaves her mise-en-scéne. Jim Jarmusch, with whom Denis worked as an assistant director, describes her films as containing “a kind of appealing sobriety, a way of avoiding dramatic cliché; though at the same time there is something very sensual and almost tactile”. This refined expression of the unspoken by the bodies of her actors reaches its pinnacle in Beau travail, where, through the medium of dance, she develops a collective choreography out of the soldiers’ bodies that is profoundly visual and physical, transmitting a tension and transcendence that are entirely unique to the film. Indeed, this was the film that made her a household name at the age of 53. She was 42 when she presented Chocolat, her first feature film, at Cannes in 1988.

We find important points of reference and background in the connections between Denis’s work and other artforms. Her work has occasionally been compared to free jazz for its use of narrative digressions and variations, and indeed her films demonstrate a profound appreciation for music, acting as a stage for a variety of genres across her filmography, and almost literally in the documentary Man no Run, about the Cameroonian band Les Têtes Brulées. The 11 soundtracks composed by the British band Tindersticks since Nénette et Boni are further proof of this, forming an essential part of the atmosphere of each story. In Beau travail, she worked with the choreographer Bernardo Montet, and in Vers Mathilde she follows and documents the creative process of the choreographer Mathilde Monnier. From the world of literature she finds not only stories for adaptation — such as Beau travail, Vendredi soir, L’intrus, Un beau soleil intérieur, Avec amour et acharnement and Stars at Noon — but also writers to collaborate with, an example being the author Christine Angot.

Authentic explorations of a cinema of the senses, Denis’s films never provide us with the kind of easy or entirely satisfying narrative closure that might tie up loose ends or give answers about her characters’ futures. Instead, just like the senses, her films offer connections and possible ways out, leaving it to the viewer to take and interpret for themselves how each film makes them feel. Denis has said that “making films is a physical business”. No surprise, then, that one of the consequences of watching her films is a desire to immerse ourselves in them, to fully inhabit their interstices of the senses and their hunger for freedom.