Over the last four decades – from her first feature film Chocolat (released when she was 42) to her recent science-fiction film High Life – Claire Denis's films have traversed histories, geographies, and genres (melodrama, horror, sci-fi, documentary, dance film), developing a distinctive body of work that de-centers narrative and dialogue in favor of a seductive, sensory immersion in rhythm and texture. Enlisting a team of collaborators (cinematographer Agnès Godard, screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, composer Stuart Staples/Tindersticks, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, actors Juliette Binoche and Alex Descas), Denis makes films that affectively investigate a diverse set of themes: gender and sexuality, abjection and desire, and the legacies of colonialism. As such, these films serve as important sites through which to study global moving-image culture of the last half century, connecting post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema and the film industries of the United States and West Africa, and influencing new generations of film and moving-image artists. This course maps these thematic, aesthetic, and collaborative intersections, tracing Denis's early life and career (from her childhood in colonial French Africa to her work on films by Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, and Andrei Tarkovsky), and analyzing in detail those films that have made her one of the most important directors in contemporary cinema. [M, C & S tracks]