7/27/2023 0 Comments Chocolat movie![]() ![]() Inspired by Catholic and Protestant doctrines on conjugal complementarity and social equilibrium, as well as by local spiritual and charismatic movements, African Christians re-evaluated and renovated family and community authority structures to address the profound changes colonialism wrought most devastatingly in the private sphere. Charlotte Walker-Said explores the radical innovations of African Catholic and Protestant evangelists who received, innovated, and repurposed Christianity to challenge local and foreign governments operating in the French-administered League of Nations Mandate of Cameroon. ![]() As part of this, African Christian religious leaders formidably and unpredictably challenged French colonial rule, and particularly forced labour and authoritarian decentralized governance, as threats to family stability and community integrity. Deleuze’s “Desert Islands”, another text that shapes The Intruder, offers a further way of reading the film’s attentiveness to the nonhuman-an attentiveness that extends, as Nancy suggests, to a consideration of environmental crisis.īetween the two World Wars, African believers transformed foreign missionary societies into profoundly local religious institutions with indigenous ecclesiastical hierarchies and devotional social and charitable networks, devising novel authority structures to control resources and govern cultural and social life. In The Intruder, this crystalline structure persists, reactivating traces of nonhuman pasts, while a focus on canine gestures and responses signals nonhuman perceptual worlds in the present. In Beau Travail, Deleuzian crystals of time draw attention to the nonhuman histories of the landscape. ![]() I draw here in particular on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image and on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of ecotechnics, as elaborated in his essay on The Intruder (a film inspired by Nancy’s autobiographical essay, L’Intrus). Addressing Beau Travail (1999) and The Intruder (2004), I examine an ecological impulse that manifests itself through a nonanthropocentric detailing of the coexistence of body and landscape, and a nonhierarchical attentiveness to the distributed agencies of humans, animals and things. This article explores the work of Claire Denis beyond the focus on the human body through which it is commonly read. Furthermore, L’Intrus’s complementary depiction of imaginaries of the South Sea islands and the Northern mountain forest suggests that the imagined relationship to a place that is unknown and far away is dependent upon an imagined relationship to the natural environment that is familiar and close by. Rather than proposing new ecological or economic imaginaries, I argue that L’Intrus is a significant ecological text precisely because it makes legible how debt-ridden imaginaries of nature intrude upon another and affect the experience of places and the policies that regulate them. Moreover, I explore how the idea of nature in L’Intrus appears as a construct in which economic and ecological relationships of debt are mediated through imaginaries of place. ![]() I examine the complex notions of indebtedness that shaped the film and its production. In reading Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, I enter into a dialogue with two recent publications that consider her cinema in light of contemporary discussions on ecology and economy: Laura McMahon’s work on the ‘ecological impulse’ at play in Denis’s films and Rosalind Galt’s analysis of the way in which Denis’s ‘default cinema’ resists contemporary neoliberal formations. ![]()
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