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#claire denis – @shihlun on Tumblr
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@shihlun / shihlun.tumblr.com

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“Apart from our selves, our own faces, our own voices, we have nothing. But perhaps that’s what’s important. Recognising the sound of your own voice and the shape of your own face. From inside, it’s like this and when I look at it, it’s like this. They look at me and they don’t know what I’m thinking, they’ll never know what I’m thinking.

Claire Denis

2022

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Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1988)

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shihlun
There are two ways to interpret this statement. The fact that the scene immediately follows Aimee's and Protee's encounter implies that the horizon serves as a metaphor for the impossibility of a real connection between Africans and Europeans. In the felicitous words of Adam Muller: 'The horizon, after all, and particularly as Marc explains it, is the site at which the land and the air reconcile; it is a site in principle only, remaining forever unreachable, lying at the very limit of our ability to perceive it' (2006: 746). As with land and air, a reconciliation of (ex-)colonizer and (ex-)colonized is conceivable only on a theoretical level.
In my opinion, however, there is still another interpretation that takes into account the film's contemporary framework. The horizon, as Marc explains it, is an optical illusion that pretends to be a (geographical) reality. The encounter between the adult France and William 'Mungo' Park, the man who offers her a ride in his car, shows that the notion of race linked to ideas of culture and national belonging is itselfan illusion. What France sees in Mungo is an illusion based on the colour of his skin, just as his reaction to France ones much to the same delusion. What they believe they have seen serves as a characterization that does not match the actual person. It is, in my opinion, not the impossibility of a union between Europe and Mrica that the metaphor of the horizon stands for, but rather the elusive nature of race and identity itself.
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“When you say ‘female director’ I already want to stop this conversation! Female director? I feel like I am an animal. I am a female director like this is a female bird. No, I am a director – good or bad I don’t know. But I am a woman.”

— Claire Denis

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