Home » Beau travail
Product Image

Beau travail

Corinn Columpar
€18.50
Quantity:
In stock with our UK publisher. 14-28 days
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days
14 days return policy Shipping & Delivery
A01=Corinn Columpar
adaptation and intertextuality
art cinema
Author_Corinn Columpar
Beau Travail
Billy Budd
Category=ATF
Category=ATFA
Category=ATFG
Category=JBSF
Category=JBSF11
Category=JBSF2
Category=JBSJ
Claire Denis
dance and choreography
desire and masculinity
East African colonial history
embodiment and movement
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
French Foreign Legion
postcolonial film
queer readings of cinema
the cinematic gaze
visual poetry in film
voice and affect

Product details

  • ISBN 9781839027130
  • Weight: 160g
  • Dimensions: 134 x 188mm
  • Publication Date: 11 Jun 2026
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
Secure checkout Fast Shipping Easy returns
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.
About Corinn Columpar
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.

More from this author