S'en fout la mort (Claire Denis, 1990).
A sliver of an angular face appears in the dark front seat of a car. A hand leaves the steering wheel with a cigarette, emanating tendrils of smoke in its wake. A whispered voiceover: “I’m Black, and my friend is the same color. He’s from the West Indies and I’m from Benin. Waiting here, a single phrase keeps coming back to me: Human beings, all human beings, of whatever race or nationality or religious belief or ideology—will do anything and everything. I can’t remember who said it, but it doesn’t matter. My name is Dah.” Answering his dismissed question, the preceding title card had already attributed the quote to Chester Himes. Cited twice and half remembered, this epigraph introduces the claustrophobic nightscape of doublings and returns that is S’en fout la mort (1990)—retitled in English as No Fear, No Die—the second fiction feature by Claire Denis, recently restored by The Film Desk/Pathé. The narrative is set in a Parisian banlieue and stalks the pair of Dah and Jocelyn, played with vigilant precision and nimble volatility by Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas, as they enter into a psychically and materially predatory collaboration to set up an illegal cockfighting operation with the white, French Pierre Ardennes (Jean-Claude Brialy, fixture of the Nouvelle Vague). Harnessing a visceral visual language of desire, violence, and alienation, S’en fout la mort negotiates an enduring inheritance of exploitative economies and antagonistic racial hierarchies in “postcolonial” France.
Given this conjugation of cinema, colonialism, and race, what more can be said of a filmmaker who grew up on the African continent as the daughter of a colonial administrator, who consistently returns to sites and subjects of marginalization, and whose auteurist gaze is all at once lucid, imposing, exoticizing, trenchant, self-critical, oblivious, and seductive? De Bankolé walks out of 1950s Cameroon as Protée in her Chocolat (1988) into the purgatorial outskirts of the Rungis commune as Dah. His movement between these diegetic geographies—between colonial mandate and the metropole—makes him the performative embodiment of how the decades following African independence resulted in the rearrangement of the same system of dependency and domination. Denis’s film plots Dah, Jocelyn, and Pierre onto a parasitic geometry, set in an a priori racialized banlieue that restages the colony. Sequencing inherently transient and claustrophobic spaces—Pierre’s truck stop restaurant, the squalid basement he gives the pair to live in and train, the nightclub run by his son, the cockfighting ring, the limbo of detritus surrounding the area—the narrative tracks the descent into a shrouded underworld that reflects what the Martinican militant psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon termed the “zone of nonbeing.”
In a 1996 interview, Denis revealed that the catalyst for S’en fout la mort was Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks (1952), specifically identifying the experience of humiliation as the thread she pulled and tied into the twisted knot of her film: “I am a very sensitive person who can't stand the feeling of humiliation, regardless if blacks or whites are the objects of this humiliation.” Her “regardless” lands uneasily, given that Fanon’s writings make the nonequivalence between Black humiliation and white humiliation clear, while the film’s authorial genesis legitimizes, to put it crudely, a white articulation of a Black condition. Fanon’s conception of the “zone of nonbeing” can be interpreted as the negated status ascribed to colonized Black people, positioned outside of notions of humanity created by the Eurocentric Western order. In the film, Dah and Jocelyn are denied access to any avenues of legal work or the (uneven) protections of citizenship. The central activity of S’en fout la mort is criminal: in French, this can be called travail au noir, an expression for illegal or undocumented work which translates literally to “working in the black.” Societally peripheral and ontologically subterranean, the pair can also only work as Black, plunged into an economic and psychological abyss that renders them unsettled specters of a colonial past that France refuses to recognize in its present.
S’en fout la mort (Claire Denis, 1990).
Dah and Jocelyn’s partner in the cockfighting scheme, Pierre, is a prototypical colonizer: a paternalist authoritarian and the incarnation of an ongoing matrix of oppression. While showing the pair around the location for their joint venture, he pauses to stand by a window overlooking the highway, like a conqueror on a cliff, and declaims, “Acres and acres of sugarcane!” Pierre rhetorically collapses the geographic and psychic maps of Rungis and Martinique, where he lived for a time and was Jocelyn’s mother’s lover. Questions of territory are intermingled with questions of filiation, with Pierre making a pretense of integrating Jocelyn into his white familial structure, only to hem him more firmly into an unassimilable racial category: “If you weren’t so Black, you might have some of my blood in you.” Later, Pierre’s son Michel (Christopher Buchholz), who is caught up in an Oedipal affair with his father’s girlfriend, Toni (Solveig Dommartin), makes a similar comment in response to her fixation on the new arrivals who displaced him, intimating she would recover her former affections if he dyed his dick with shoe polish.
A central filmic signature of Denis’s is her lavish attention to skin, color, surfaces, and texture. Hers is a cinema of bodies, with an erotic pulse that courses through particularly murky waters where Black characters are concerned—all the more so given that for Fanon, Blackness is “overdetermined from the outside,” fixed in place by the white gaze. Dah and Jocelyn are intentionally twinned in the film, sartorial doubles of each other. In this way, the film toys with how Black people are seen by others as interchangeable, such as when Pierre yells after the Beninese Dah, “You West Indians are assholes.” Indeed, banishing Blackness to an indistinguishable, constrained embodiment and empty exteriority is ingrained in the colonialist foundations of cinema. In one way, Denis’s film enacts this technologized epidermal fixation, one that imposes a violent visibility and outward knowability onto Black people. In another way, the privileging of gesture, silence, and interior opacity is where S’en fout la mort offers the possibility of a protective counter-text.
Across her filmography, Denis has made fascinating and oblique use of literary adaptations, with the intertextuality of this film encoded through Fanon and the epigraph by Himes, a Black American writer of Black detective novels. The opening aphorism has a tone-setting function, introducing the film’s atmosphere of a brooding noir, one that turns on not only a criminalized underworld but also on the unresolved crime of colonization. Crucially, Dah’s voice-over, by turns thoughtful and terse, serves to reinforce the film’s slippery emphasis on surfaces. Delivering virtually no insights into himself, Dah mostly offers an observational chronicle of Jocelyn, whose voice is the absence at the heart of the narrative. Both their subjectivities ultimately remain expressively opaque, shielded from the harms of the dominant gaze. Yet with a Fanonian perspective on the fraught linkage between Blackness and exteriority, camouflaging Dah and Jocelyn’s interiorities makes the cost of safety another form of violation.
S’en fout la mort has been associated with Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), and with good reason, given how the camera obsessively shadows the central pair’s hands, especially Jocelyn’s. Shot after shot traces a haptic iconography of caretaking. Dah’s observational narration of Jocelyn speaks to how closely he looks after his partner. Early on, they appear sitting side by side in the back of a truck, Jocelyn cradling a rooster in his lap while Dah counts a stack of bills with both hands, before reaching over and tucking a few of them into the other’s coat, saying “You never have anything on you.” The camera is at its most fetishistic when surveying Jocelyn’s handling of the roosters: stroking their feathers, delicately feeding them, weighing and fluffing them, and training them through routines ranging from throwing them up and down in the air to putting the birds through laps in a cage with the aid of a small broom. Denis’s now-constant collaborator Agnès Godard served as camera operator, although she is often wrongly credited with her later role of cinematographer, which is here filled by Pascal Marti. Together, they rely on a handheld camera to orchestrate a cinematic gaze of disquieting intimacy and proximity, combining the film’s noir tonalities with the language of documentary. In cockfighting sequences, the handheld choreography creates an immersive, dizzying sense of speed and brutality. The fights are feverish and bloody, drowned in the cacophony of a gambling audience made up almost exclusively of men from the banlieue’s colonially composed multiracial and multiethnic population.
S’en fout la mort (Claire Denis, 1990).
The cruel visuality of the cockfights is ultimately analogized with the injury embedded in the white gaze on Black subjects. Although Dah and Jocelyn’s material co-survival and gestural caretaking are set against this spectacular violence, their exchanges nevertheless traffic in another form of violence: the constructed kinship between Blackness and animality. This vexed allegorical correspondence is most apparent in Jocelyn, especially given his unwillingness to speak. As the cockfights fail to deliver the expected profits and the pair’s dynamic with Pierre grows tenser, Jocelyn withdraws further into silence, behaving increasingly erratically, letting the birds out of their cages en masse, lying down catatonically, running away and refusing to even communicate with Dah. Fanon’s presence behind S’en fout la mort offers a way of reading the psychic disintegration that results from the dispossessions and trauma of colonization. Inscribed into this racialized and predatory system in “postcolonial” France, Jocelyn and Dah’s fates are tied to the roosters. All are drafted into a rigged game they have lost before it even begins.
During the explosive final fight, Jocelyn crosses over the symbolic boundary to inhabit the role of cockfighter, jumping and lunging around the ring, reenacting the training he taught his birds. Completely exposed to the spectators, he delivers an invective against the blood sport which thereby also indicts its allegorical remapping of the colony, as Pierre’s son Michel fatally stabs him with a knife. Denis’s film creates a sense of fated tragedy, which is signaled sonically. The perfectly calibrated original jazz score by Abdullah Ibrahim—a South African musician who went into exile during apartheid—envelops S’en fout la mort in a slow burn of hypnotic, sensorial restlessness. More pointedly, Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” plays over the opening credits and again at the beginning of Jocelyn’s unraveling, both times diegetically after Dah inserts the cassette tape. The refrain “Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival,” referring to African American soldiers, also serves to define the pair’s position as Black colonial subjects. Taken together, the music braids a countertext of global Black resistance.
During production, haunted by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Denis took Descas to an exhibition of “paintings that had corpses and skeletons with deathlike smiles. I told Alex that I wouldn't direct him when he gets stabbed in the film's final scene, but he should remember Basquiat's images with death-like smiles.” S’en fout la mort is a haunted narrative. Animated by economies of desire and exploitation, this tightly wound film sees the rearticulation of the colony in the banlieue and the continuation of racialized oppression in a dance of death. For Jocelyn, this becomes the only exit from a predetermined and inescapable condition, and his demise temporarily releases Dah from their ill-fated enterprise in Rungis. As Dah carefully wipes the blood from his friend’s body, he narrates a verdant scene of return to Martinique: conjuring Jocelyn’s mother, siblings, and grandfather; verbally restoring a lost family relation. The last shot finds Dah in the back of a taxi, moving toward another unknown, outliving Jocelyn but still carrying him forward, a reminder that how we survive is always also a question of how we mourn.