me more than I was hurt by the ra-
pist.” Denis told me, “I did recover. I
did recover.”
In subsequent years, Denis was an
extra in Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights
of a Dreamer” and cast a movie for An-
drei Tarkovsky. She also worked as an
assistant director for Jacques Rivette and
Costa-Gavras, and travelled through the
Southwest with Wim Wenders, for
“Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire,”
and the Louisiana bayou with Jim Jar-
musch, for “Down by Law.” Wenders
had wanted someone “strong and tough,”
he told me. He recalled that when he
met Denis at the Houston airport, in
1983, a “fragile and relatively petite blond
young woman came out of the gate.”
Denis said, “At the very beginning, they
would say, Can you drive? I said yes. Can
you do this? I said yes. Can you jump?
I said yes. I said yes to everything, and
sometimes it wasn’t true. It wasn’t that
I was eager to prove that a woman could
be as strong as a man, but I thought, If
I say no, then it’s finished.”I
n 1994, a few months after Nelson
Mandela was elected President of
South Africa, Denis was invited to a
film festival in Johannesburg. She trav-
elled there with Alex Descas, and they
decided to make a detour to Durban,
the childhood home of the Portuguese
poet Fernando Pessoa. Speaking of his
poems, Denis said, “There was some-
thing I could always read in between
the lines. I think because we had both
been babies in these faraway countries—
far from our language and our grand-
parents and our food.”
They stayed at a hotel in Durban
with a view of the ocean. “Now, when I
see the sea, I simply must swim, even if
it is winter,” Denis said. “I put on my
swimming costume and ran to the beach.
And now that Mandela was elected, I
thought, no longer would the beach be
separated between blacks and whites.
Alex asked me, ‘Are you sure?’ I said,
‘Yes!’ I ran down there. I was alone on
the beach, I swam. And I rested in the
sand, and suddenly I saw a teacher with
little children, little black boys and girls,
walking at the edge of the waves and
singing. They began playing in the water,
and I was in the exaltation of being in
the Indian Ocean in Durban in South
Africa at the bottom of the earth, so Iran! I ran to the teacher and the little
children and I said, ‘Good morning!
Good morning!’ I jumped into the water
next to them, and they screamed of fear.
I politely moved away and excused my-
self. I suddenly realized it had been only
two months and it was not the proper
thing to do.”
The encounter, as Denis described it,
features the sublime natural landscape
and stark colors of some of her most
vivid scenes. Less a storyteller than she
is an image-maker, she once became fix-
ated on re-creating the painter Francis
Bacon’s “very peculiar” colors, which make
it impossible to tell whether the flesh he
depicts is “raw or rotten.” Another time,
to prepare Descas for a role she took him
to a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition, to
point out the paintings’ “deathlike smiles.”
“She’s creating her own world,” Vin-
cent Maravel, a co-founder of Wild
Bunch, a European company that has
distributed Denis’s films, said. “She
doesn’t really look at what other peo-
ple think or do. She’s never fashionable.
She just describes her obsessions the
way they are, not the way they should
be, or in a way that might be palatable.
She isn’t trying to represent France or
women or her era.” Maravel cited as an
example “35 Shots of Rum,” from 2008,
which depicts a college-aged girl and
her loving father, an African immigrant
and widower: “They’re not rich, but
they’re not gangsters. She made a movie
about what is probably the majority of
France, and she just looked at these
people in a human way.” Almost the
entire cast is black, and although stu-
dents in a classroom scene chatter about
Frantz Fanon, there are few explicit al-
lusions to race. It’s as if the matter were
both too obvious and too beside the
point to bother addressing at all.
Similarly, in “High Life,” some of
the convicts are black, but they are not
a message-telegraphing majority. When
the film’s American producers read the
script, they urged Denis to change the
fact that the first character to die was
a black man. In the U.S. today, they told
her, this was just not done. For Amer-
icans, Denis said, the problem of rac-
ism “is buried so deep. For me, it was
not deep.” She refused to change the
plot, writing in more dialogue instead.
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