Salty Lakes and Absorbing Deserts: Reading the Landscape in Claire Denis’s Cinema

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Some of Claire Denis’s most picturesque films, Beau travail (1999) and White Material (2009), are saturated with troubling images of encompassing deserts and destructive waters. In Beau travail, the main character leads one of his subordinates to a demise: half-recognizable, he is framed towards the end of the film in an enveloping close-up as the Lake Assal’s salt is eating away his skin and the division between body and landscape dissolves. In White Material, the continual overflowing green of the African bush is both fascinating and contradictory: it is alternately a powerful and seductive force that constructs the sense of greenness in contrast to the exploited red soil of the coffee plantation in the film; and a shifting ground, harboring the rebels as a civil war begins to erupt. The meanings of these picturesque tropes that traverse the films are, however, typically flexible and unresolved. They reach beyond easily identifiable readings and resist value systems, while simultaneously alluding to contrasts including aggressive and tender, stark and subtle. This article examines Denis’s peculiar engagement with natural landscapes of France’s former colonies, as zones of eco-critical experimentation that enables new modes of listening, looking, and filming. Through close analysis of the works’ affective aesthetics, the allusive and fragmented temporal structure, as well as the potent picturesque and painterly images scattered throughout their narratives, I show how Beau travail and White Material present a powerful interrogation on precarity and ethics in a world dominated by exploitation, colonial history, and increasing environmental crises.