Toward Mathilde

This program screens for free at UT’s Downtown Gallery.

Claire Denis, 2005, 84 minutes

Midway through Toward Mathilde, a dancer improvises a movement, spinning and landing hard on one foot. Even to the untrained eye the gesture seems inert. Mathilde Monnier interrupts to ask, “Where could it take you apart from a circle?” He stops, thinks, resets, edits his movement, and suddenly the gesture comes to life. When asked about the similarities between Monnier’s role as a choreographer and her own responsibilities as a film director, Claire Denis replied, “We both must be aware when a movement is becoming a trap.”

Toward Mathilde, like A Dancer’s World and One Day Pina Asked…, is shot mostly in a rehearsal space, as Monnier develops ideas that will eventually become Publique, a work set to music by P.J. Harvey; Allitérations, a collaboration with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy; and Déroutes, a piece inspired by Georg Büchner’s unfinished short story “Lenz.” It’s a fitting subject for Denis and cinematographers Agnes Godard and Helene Louvart, whose work in narrative cinema is likewise preoccupied with gesture–most famously in Beau Travail (1999), made with choreographer Bernardo Montet.