Ecologies of debt in Claire Denis’s L’Intrus/The Intruder (2004)

Abstract In reading Claire Denis’s L’Intrus, the author enters into a dialogue with two recent publications that consider her cinema in light of contemporary discussions on ecology and economy: Laura McMahon’s work on the ‘ecological impulse’ at play in Denis’s films and Rosalind Galt’s analysis of the way in which Denis’s ‘default cinema’ resists contemporary neoliberal formations. The author examines the complex notions of indebtedness that shaped the film and its production. Moreover, she explores how the idea of nature in L’Intrus appears as a construct in which economic and ecological relationships of debt are mediated through imaginaries of place. Rather than proposing new ecological or economic imaginaries, she argues that L’Intrus is a significant ecological text precisely because it makes legible how debt-ridden imaginaries of nature intrude upon another and affect the experience of places and the policies that regulate them. Furthermore, L’Intrus’s complementary depiction of imaginaries of the South Sea islands and the Northern mountain forest suggests that the imagined relationship to a place that is unknown and far away is dependent upon an imagined relationship to the natural environment that is familiar and close by.