RSVP here: queer-art.org/rsvp-to-beau-travail
Streaming links here: queer-art.org/streaming-links-for-qaf-summer-2021
BEAU TRAVAIL
1999. 92 min. Directed by Claire Denis
Claire Denis created BEAU TRAVAIL in response to a request by the French government to develop a film on the subject of “being foreign.” Set in Djibouti, Africa, the film follows soldiers in the French Foreign Legion, and is loosely based on Herman Melville’s 1888 Billy Bud. BEAU TRAVAIL is a movie that marries alterity and difference, tracking the crumbling self-worth of an experienced military leader on one of his last tours. Rendering perplexing and overlapping states of disillusion, the viewer can hardly decipher between dream, fantasy, and memory in the film and Denis toys with these boundaries, shooting in a way to keep these states in constant motion. Our guest presenter, performance artist Julie Tolentino, describes Beau Travail as “the piece [she’s] always wanted to make,” wherein “attractions are tangled with jealousy or envy” and “memory is lost to fantasy.”
Julie Tolentino on BEAU TRAVAIL:
“I can’t stop thinking about this soldier dehydrated on the salty white sandy beach — this reminds me of David Wojnarowicz for some reason. So much sound and movement is bound in their bodies: ready to burst, already outsiders and distant but still youth both radiant yet deceiving — like the desert, like the sea — all close kin & distance! Attractions are tangled with jealousy or envy. Memory is lost to fantasy. The dance at the end - this miserable emptiness in the wonderful empty swirling light disco — it is like the piece I always wanted to make / or that I want everyone to do. Endless hours of spinning lighted spots, a body that can’t be penetrated by them, and I am always attracted to distance.”
Julie Tolentino is a performance installation maker whose work draws from a variety of visual, archival, and movement strategies. Her work has been presented at many venues, including the New Museum, The Kitchen, Danspace Project in NY; Volume, Los Angeles Contemporary, Broad at UCLA, Honor Fraser, Cypress Gallery, The Sphaerae/AXS Festival, Commonwealth & Council, The Night Gallery, Pieter, High Desert Test Sites, The Reanimation Library, The Palms in Southern California; The Lab, Joe Goode Annex, PSi Stanford in Northern California; The Wexner Center, Performa '05 and '13, and internationally in the UK, France, Germany, Philippines, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Greece. In 2020, Tolentino was awarded the Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement.
Queer|Art|Film is supported by HBO and presented in partnership with IFC.