The Music of Relationality in the Cinema of Claire Denis

ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Concert and disconcertion: the music of relationality in the cinema of Claire Denis https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40453/ Version: Full Version Citation: Brown, Geoffrey (2019) Concert and disconcertion: the music of relationality in the cinema of Claire Denis. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email 1 Concert and Disconcertion : the music of relationality in the cinema of Claire Denis Geoffrey Brown Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in French 2019 Department of European Cultures and Languages Birkbeck, University of London 2 Declaration I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own, and that this thesis is the one on which I expect to be examined. Geoffrey Brown 3 This thesis is dedicated to Agnès Calatayud, an inspirational teacher, who reconnected me to French cinema after a long carence, and who, crucially, first introduced me to the films of Claire Denis. 4 Abstract This thesis argues that the interest which the films of Claire Denis display in the ever-shifting modes of relations between people is illustrated through analysis of how music is used throughout her corpus of feature films. Denis draws on an extremely eclectic palette of musical styles, and the thesis proposes that these varying musical modalities are central to her treatment of relational issues, as are the ways in which she deploys her chosen musical selections. In this thesis, I develop a number of analytical tools. I draw on the thinking of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy with regard to questions of relationality, community and the dissensual elements which inform both interpersonal relationships and artistic creativity. I adapt the work of Kathryn Lachman on concepts of polyphony and counterpoint in literature for application to the oeuvre of Denis, as I do the writings of Michel Chion on music in film, especially his conceptualization of empathetic modes of cinematic music. The thesis concludes that music in the work of Claire Denis operates in a mode which diverges significantly from the tenets of existing film music theory. Music in a Denis film is at the same time far more fragmentary and yet much more thoroughly integrated than allowed for by standard conceptualizations. It plays hand-in-hand with the challenges and invitations which are a feature of the cinema of Denis. 5 Table of contents Declaration…………………………………………....2 Dedication …………………………………………....3 Abstract ……………………………………………....4 Introduction ………………………..……………..7 Literature review…………………………….8 Music and the cinema of Denis …………..12 Methodology ………………………………..19 Summary…………………………………….30 Chapter 1: Polyphony………………………….....34 J’ai pas sommeil ……………………...…...38 Beau travail …………………………….…..63 White Material ……………………….……..83 Chapter 2: Counterpoint ………..……………….103 US Go Home …………………...……..…..106 Trouble Every Day …………………….…..123 L’Intrus …………………………...………...146 35 rhums ………………………………..….162 Chapter 3: Fluid empathy ……………………….180 Vendredi soir …………………….…………181 Les Salauds …………………….………….197 6 Chapter 4: Incompletion and coherence ……..213 Deconstruction……………………….…….213 Fragmentation………………………….…..215 Ambient sound………………………….….219 Sound levels and silences………….….....221 Musical integrity……………………………227 Different uses of film music……………….229 Risk and the audience……………...….….236 Centrality of music……………………...….241 Conclusions…………………………………….….246 Annex A: Bibliography ………………………….….255 Annex B: Filmography ………………………….….265 Annex C: Glossary of musical terms ……………..267 Annex D: Selected song lyrics…………………….269 7 Introduction Music is essentially about aesthetic experiences and the creative expression of individual human beings in community, about the sharing of ideas.1 […] the way we relate to the things of the world is no longer as a pure intellect trying to master an object or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited, and an enigmatic world.2 A work of art is a new syntax […] Syntax in cinema amounts to the linkages and relinkages of images, but also the relation between sound and the visual image.3 Every ‘successful’ relation – successful in that it manages to say the implicit without articulating it, to pass over articulation without falling into the censorship of desire or the sublimation of the unspeakable – such a relation can rightly be called musical.4 My aim in this thesis is to examine how the cinema of Claire Denis uses music to address questions of relationality.5 Critical assessment of the oeuvre of Denis has noted from time to time her use of music. This has largely been where the music has an insistent quality which cannot be overlooked: the interpolation of Britten in Beau travail; the forceful presence of Jean-Louis Murat and Kali in J'ai pas sommeil; the strident loops created by Stuart Staples for L'Intrus. Those examples are outstanding instances of how Denis uses music to challenge assumed or expected narratives. My proposition is that, far from being special or isolated breakings-out or breakings-in of music in her films, they are simply 1 John Blacking, A Common-Sense View of All Music, (CUP, 1987), p.146. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Causeries (1948), trans. by Oliver Davis as The World of Perception (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.69-70. 3 'The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze', in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema ed. by Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p.370. First published in Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986. Translation by Marie Therese Guirgis. 4 Roland Barthes, ‘Music, voice, language’ in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp.284-85. Emphasis in original. 5 My consideration focuses on the eleven full-length feature films which Claire Denis released up until mid-2017. 8 the most apparent occasions of the use of music throughout her work as a means of providing a meta-narrative, or a series of meta-affects, which deploy music as a medium of critique and query. The filmmaker herself has offered the view that: 'Quelqu'un qui branche une radio ou qui écoute au juke box est finalement dans une relation avec quelque chose'.6 That statement indicates that music is important to her as part of the exploration of relational issues which we find in her work. I use the term relationality as describing and encompassing the numerous ways in which people and things come into relation. At the interpersonal level, this embraces how individuals connect, or try to connect, or even fail to connect, with other individuals. Those interpersonal channels, or attempts to construct them, lead naturally to consideration of how the individual stands vis-à-vis society or community, how individual and community interrelate, and how individuals and communities find a relation to the world around them. Much valuable critical thought, dealing specifically with Denis films from standpoints connected to relationality, has already taken place and I review that literature as a prelude to my own analyses, which focus on how music works as a medium for engaging with relationality in her cinema. Literature review Interest in the relevance of relational issues for the cinema of Denis has been growing in the last decade or so. Martine Beugnet pointed in 2004 to Denis's 'prob[ing] the more hidden implications of the multiform experience of exclusion, and in particular the internalisation of discriminatory discourses'.7 And, significantly, Judith Mayne gave the subtitle of 'Seeing Others' to the substantive part of her monograph.8 Other studies have focused on specific aspects of relations between characters. One example of this is James S. 6 'Anyone listening to the radio or jukebox is actually relating to something'. In Sébastien Lifshitz, Claire Denis la vagabonde (FEMIS 2005 – their subtitles). 7 Claire Denis (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), p.3. 8 Claire Denis (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 9 Williams's comparison of the treatments of the father-daughter relationships in Denis's 35 rhums (2008) and in Ozu's Late Spring (1949), where he concludes that the sensitive handling in the former amounts to a new version of relationality: 'by deregulating and romancing the Father [35 rhums] successfully negotiates and reinvests familial structures and social prohibitions'.9 Andrew Asibong argues that relations between individual characters, in several Denis films, seem thwarted by convention and situation, only for the filmmaker to offer brief, tantalizing moments where intimacy might have been possible.10 A corresponding view is offered by Leo Bersani, who situates Beau travail within his interest in films which: 'seem to be testing definitions and conditions of intimacy and, in so doing, have proposed new or at least unfamiliar relational configurations'.11 Bersani argues that: 'Claire Denis tests the identities – realized, potential, erased identities – produced by different kinds of movement' (97). This line of thought, that Denis is engaged in a kind of filmic wondering about relationality, strikes me as a very productive means of approach to her cinema. One of

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