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Beau travail
Series: BFI Film Classics
Brief Description
Beau Travail (1998) is Claire Denis' bold, sensuous masterpiece. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), the film explores the complexities of desire, identity, and power within an all-male group of French Foreign Legionnaires stationed at a coastal outpost in the former colony of...
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Beau travail
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See moreA study of Claire Denis' s exhilarating drama Beau travail (1998) in the BFI Film Classics series
A study of Claire Denis' s exhilarating drama Beau travail (1998) in the BFI Film Classics series
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Description
Beau Travail (1998) is Claire Denis' bold, sensuous masterpiece. Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), the film explores the complexities of desire, identity, and power within an all-male group of French Foreign Legionnaires stationed at a coastal outpost in the former colony of Djibouti, in East Africa.
The film cemented Denis' position as a leading auteur and visual poet. In this book, Corinn Columpar positions the film as a cinematic bid for freedom. She examines its formal innovations—particularly the use of the gaze, voice, and movement—to explain how Denis produces exhilarating possibilities narratively, affectively, and ideologically, while also situating the film within the histories of art cinema and postcolonial filmmaking.
Series: BFI Film Classics
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781839027130
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 11 June 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: BFI Publishing
Illustration: 60 colour illus
Audience: Tertiary education
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 6.0mm
Width: 134.0mm
Height: 188.0mm
Weight: 160g
Pages: 96
About the Author
Corinn Columpar is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (2010). She is co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (2009) and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media, and Caregiving Labor (2022). She has published widely on feminist film theory, embodiment and representation in journals including Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Women Studies Quarterly.
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