Towards Mathilde

The documentary follows the choreographer Mathilde Monnier through the preparation of a piece: the rehearsal room, conversations with dancers, movements repeated, and moments where nobody can decide when a section ends. The subject is not a portrait of the choreographer but how movement gets invented. The film does not show step by step how a dance work is assembled; instead it collects the hesitations, the repetitions and the fatigue. The form is very close to Claire Denis' own cinema: faces and bodies in close-up, context missing, fragments instead of continuity. The cinematographer Agnès Godard shoots the body like a landscape, and the dance appears in detail rather than whole. Denis is rarely discussed for her non-fiction, and this is one of her few documentaries, watchable as an encounter between two artists working on the same problem. Music by PJ Harvey is used in the film. Who it is for: viewers who like contemporary dance and films that look at the act of making. Who it is not for: anyone wanting to learn who Monnier is; the film offers no biographical information and never stops to inform you.