‘O Heave! O Heave away,Heave! O Heave!’

Abstract

This article argues that the full significance ofBeau Travail only becomes clear if it is placed within both the history of Denis’s evolving commentary on the film and its specificauteur context: that is to say, as a fully assumed intervention by a female director in a male artistic tradition. A study of the processes of intertextual ‘translation’ and ‘graft’ in the extended project ofBeau Travail reveals that Denis’s engagement with masculinity at different levels, including that of the cinematic apparatus itself, constitutes the very basis of her filmic practice which is always sexually charged and must negotiate the fundamental destructiveness of desire through the sublimation of aesthetic form.