ABSTRACT
With the onset of globalization came global culture, global capitalism, and their counterparts with global cinema. Simultaneously, auteur cinema, especially its variants of New Wave national cinemas, continued to mark European and African filmmaking. Claire Denis spanned those two continents with her first film Chocolat (1988), which was set in late colonial Cameroon. In contrast with Living in Bondage (1992) and its Nollywood revolution, Denis’s film shows the influence of European filmmaking, like that of Wenders with whom she worked as assistant director. Her film brings together a French and African cast, opening spaces for a transnational cinema (Hjort, cited in Durovicova 2010) to compete with its “world” or “global” commercialized models. Yet the film’s cosmopolitanism does not suggest an optimistic future, but rather matches the darker mood of late colonialism as its period of rule was coming to its end. Derrida’s “Law of Genre” is used to analyze the central theme and image of the horizon that Denis employs in her engagement with the landscape of nostalgia for a past as it fades into the distance.
