Poetic Objects: Bachelardian Reverie,

Reverberation and Repose in Claire Denis’

35 Shots of Rum
Saige Walton , University of South Australia

Abstract:
This article draws on the interrelated concepts of reverie and repose in Gaston
Bachelard’s philosophy to approach Claire Denis’ poetic foregrounding of objects
in 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums, 2008). Connecting Bachelard’s work on time to his
later studies of the imagination, I demonstrate how the poetic time of reverie and
repose are essential to Bachelard’s thinking. Focusing on three especially charged
objects (trains, rice cookers and lanterns), I argue for reverie and repose as being
embedded into the rhythmic structure, affective organisation and form of Denis’
film. Contextualising Bachelard’s later thinking in relation to Eugène Minkowski, I
maintain that Denis’ objects reverberate (both formally and sensuously). In 35
Shots of Rum, Denis’ poetic objects and her evocation of different in-between states
parallels Bachelard’s own materialist thinking on the imagination, reverie and
repose.

Keywords: Gaston Bachelard; Claire Denis; film poetics; reverie; reverberation;

Eugène Minkowski.

Thus, the meticulous, detailed imagination seeks to slip into everything,

inviting us not just to retire into our shells but to slip into every shell so that
we may live the life of true retirement there […] and all the values of repose.
(Bachelard, 1948/2011, p. 13)

Film-Philosophy 27.1 (2023): 7–28

DOI: 10.3366/film.2023.0214
© Saige Walton. This article is published as Open Access under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://www.
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use,
distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited. For commercial
re-use, please refer to our website at: www.euppublishing.com/customer-
services/authors/permissions.
www.euppublishing.com/film

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

In this article, I bring the twinned concepts of reverie and repose in

Gaston Bachelard’s philosophy to bear on one of Claire Denis’ more
gentle, tender and sedate films, 35 Shots of Rum (35 Rhums, 2008).
In much sensuous scholarship to date, Denis tends to be associated with
movement: the filming of bodies moving, touching, dancing; the forward
momentum of vehicles; ambiguous slippages between the past and the
present; or a free-floating movement between shots. Similarly, much has
been made of the non-verbal tendencies of Denis’ work. 35 Shots of Rum,
for example, has been described by critics as a film in which characters
“seem to have no language for their feelings” (Bíró, 2009, p. 38; see also
Davis, 2009). In engaging Bachelard’s writings for my discussion of
Denis here I am interested in exploring the shifting qualities of movement
that pervade 35 Shots of Rum, the film’s return to bodies half asleep or at
rest and Denis’ poetic organisation of the film around particular objects.
In Bachelard’s later works on the imagination, the philosopher
develops an intersensory account of the imagination that attends to the
materiality of objects, spaces and environments. For Bachelard, reverie
interleaves movement with moments of stillness and contemplation,
relaxing the ontological borders between things. Intrinsic to reverie
in Bachelard is his career-long dedication to developing a philosophy
of repose wherein one attunes to the time of the imagination,
including the imagination of objects (see Bachelard, 1960/1971;
1958/1994; 1943/2011; 1948/2011; 1936/2000).1 By attending to the
non-verbal speaking of not only bodies and gestures but also objects and
their surroundings, Denis’ film reflects the unhurried time of the
imagination in Bachelard, where “[d]écor takes precedence over drama”
(1960/1971, p. 14).
In what follows, I focus on a number of charged objects in 35 Shots
of Rum, drawing out the ways in which these objects resonate with
Bachelardian states of reverie and repose: a train on its tracks, a rice
cooker and a child’s lantern. Contextualising Bachelard’s later thinking in
relation to philosopher Eugène Minkowski, I maintain that Denis’ objects
reverberate through their surrounding environment and through the film
itself, echoing formally and sensuously. As well as boasting a particular
spatio-temporal dynamic (relaxed time, an association with domesticity
or interiority), Denis’ poetic objects and their reverberation in the film
usher in moments of what Bachelard calls an intimate “intensity”

1 Bachelard approached repose from a number of different methodological perspectives

throughout his career: scientific, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, spiritual and
cosmological (see Préclaire, 2017, p. 268).

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 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

(1958/1994, p. 193). That intensity reaches a particularly bittersweet

crescendo in the Lübeck sequence by the seaside where the children’s
lantern parades and their aftermath echo the film’s overarching themes of
familial love, time and becoming.

Trains and Tracks: Reverie and Repose

As has been well documented, Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum pays homage to
Japanese director Yasujiro ˉ Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), Hou Hsiao-
hsien’s cinematic nod to Ozu, Café Lumière (2004) and to the close
familial bonds that existed between her own Brazilian-born grandfather
and her mother.2 Set in the northern suburbs of Paris among an
established French-Caribbean community, the film centres on the happy
domesticity that is shared between a widowed father, Lionel (Alex
Descas), a local train driver, and his daughter, Joséphine (Jo) (Mati
Diop). For Denis, put simply, 35 Shots of Rum is “a film about love”
(Soudaigne, 2008). As well as being about love, though, the film is
premised upon the separation of its core “couple” (Lionel and Jo). Most of
the film’s events take place before Jo’s passage into an alternate, married
life. Similarly, the repetition of certain motifs such as the train moving
forward on its tracks or the film’s return to the site of the darkened
hallway (a space adjacent to the glow of Lionel and Jo’s apartment) hint at
impending change. Time and its transition are “why I chose the train-
driving job” for the character of Lionel and others, Denis commented in
an interview. “I thought in a train, time is passing, everything is constantly
changing [….] I would like everything to stay still sometimes and not to
change” (Denis, as cited in Moran, 2009).
One of Bachelard’s first references to the idea of repose occurs in his
early writings on time, writing as a philosopher and historian of science.
In The dialectic of duration (Bachelard’s second book on time), he
introduces the “teaching of a philosophy of repose”, glossing repose as
“happy vibration” (1936/2000, pp. 17, 21). Taking issue with Henri
Bergson’s account of duration, Bachelard argues for time as a “plurality of
durations” (pp. 17–19).3 To advance his discontinuous take on time, he
develops “a dialectic of being in duration” that is shaped by the
alternating rhythms of action and repose (“rhythmic attentiveness and
rhythmic repose”) (p. 21).

2 On the film’s relationship with Ozu see Williams (2009, pp. 48–50).
3 In Intuition of the instant, Bachelard (1932/2013, pp. 8–24) also takes issue with
Bergson’s theory of temporal continuity.

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

Rather than associating repose with stillness and fixity, Bachelard

understands repose as bringing about “renewals of being” (p. 21). For
Bachelard, repose is conducive to one’s inner health and calm: “A sick
soul – especially one that suffers the pain of time and of despair – has to
be cured by living and thinking rhythmically”, he writes (1936/2000,
p. 21).4 As Cristina Chimisso helps to explain, repose involves more than
physical rest or respite; it involves resting from the demands of intellectual
knowledge. Most importantly, repose is the time in which “the
imagination can express itself” (2000, p. 10). In Bachelard’s view,
human beings need to exercise both their intellectual and their
imaginative faculties. In fact, these “two dialectical activities – intellectual
and imaginative – should form part of the rhythm of our life” (Chimisso,
2000, p. 11).
In The dialectic of duration, Bachelard’s (1936/2000, p. 21) suggested
“well-ordered dialectic” included making time for repose. In his later
studies of the imagination, he harks back to his earlier writing on time
by identifying all of the “fundamental elements for a philosophy of
repose” in states of reverie (1960/1971, p. 20). Through the creation
of imagined images, the poet brings about “a renewed reality” that fosters
calm and tranquillity (Kearney, 1991, p. 102). As it occupies an alternate
duration (the “existentialism of the poetic”), reverie “illustrates repose
for a being […;] it illustrates well-being”, Bachelard maintains (1960/1971,
p. 12).
In 35 Shots of Rum, the train moving on its tracks is the prime object
through which Denis figures in-between states of motion and rest, evoking
the non-duration and calm of reverie and repose. Rather than beginning
with a familial scene between Lionel and Jo, the film opens with the slow-
paced, wavering sounds of the ondes martenot instrument. These sounds
lend the film a dreamy, wistful tone even before its first images appear.
The black screen cedes to rumbling footage of a train belonging to the
Réseau Express Régional (RER), the commuter train network that
connects Paris to its outer suburbs. As the train moves down a long
track, shafts of fading sunlight bounce off of the train’s slightly worn front
window. The onset of the train introduces a melody that Martine Beugnet
describes as “old-fashioned and very ‘French’” but evocative of “an
elsewhere”, an elsewhere that is conjured up by the distinctive use of the

4 Unlike other philosophers of the imagination, Bachelard associates the imagination

with good health, often making reference to imagining techniques in psychotherapy
(see Kearney, 1991, p. 99).

10
 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

melodica in the film’s soundtrack, composed by Denis’ frequent musical

collaborators, the Tindersticks (2014, p. 5).5 Sonically, this melody
intermingles with the metallic, clacking sounds of the train’s carriages,
rocking back and forth.
As the train moves along curving tracks, it opens up views of multiple,
intersecting tracks and switch stations, passing road traffic and the
outer environs of Paris at dusk. A group of railway workers appears
through the front glass window, prompting a blast of the train’s whistle
by way of acknowledgment. Still, the film’s intentional focus stays with
the cabin’s frontal perspective and is detached from an identifiable
human figure.6 Only after the train passes through a darkened tunnel
(timed to coincide with the appearance of the film’s soft orange titles,
glowing like a set of headlights) does Denis break with this trajectory.
As the train’s long carriages screech across the frame, the film’s opening
melody fades out and the camera shifts to focus on Lionel. He is
smoking and watching the passing trains from a distance, waiting for Jo to
finish work.
Rather than privileging human figures (Lionel, the workers or the
train’s commuters), the opening of 35 Shots of Rum attends to the glassed
enclosure of the train and to the train’s steady, rhythmic sounds.
According to Denis, she wanted to begin the film by “driving with the
tracks” as it generates a feeling that is “so hypnotic […] it encourages
anyone to introspect. It’s immediate” (Denis, as cited in Davis, 2009).
Time and again, Denis returns to the ambient footage of a train’s frontal
perspective (shot by Denis’ long-running cinematographer Agnès Godard
with a hand-held camera in the front cabin). This footage lends the film a
lulling, rhythmic sensibility (oftentimes detached from any one human
figure), an effect that is enhanced by the Tindersticks’ floating score. As
Yvette Bíró comments, the film’s “recurring events (sitting in a crowded
carriage, waiting to meet someone off the train) become, because of the
[film’s] governing rhythm, poetic” (2009, p. 40). Through her return to
the rhythmic motion of trains, especially, Denis conjures up the kind of
“being at rest” that Bachelard (1960/1971, p. 18) discerns in reverie.
Throughout the film, the inbound and outbound movement of the RER
trains alternate with profile shots of train drivers such as Lionel or René

5 According to the Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples, the film’s opening composition came to
him after seeing Denis’ footage of the train on its tracks whereby he “felt the rhythm”
(see Beugnet, 2014, p. 3).
6 While the point of view of the driver’s seat is later attached to one of Lionel’s colleagues,
Denis’ focus is on the train as a moving object in space here.

11
 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

(Julieth Mars Toussaint), occupying the driver’s seat, footage of different

passengers, lost in their own thoughts, the vertical or curving patterns of
the tracks and horizontally composed shots of trains, elegantly criss-
crossing the screen.
If trains in the cinema have typically functioned as a dramatic setting
for scenarios of murder, escape, romance and sex (Alfred Hitchcock, Billy
Wilder, Max Ophüls), Denis’ use of the train lends this film an often
lyrical sense of calm and rest. While providing a loose means of plotting
(Lionel’s job, the suicide of Lionel’s co-worker René), the train also exists
independent of plotting and causality. It functions as a recurrent means
by which Denis’ film opens up atmospheric states of reverie and repose:
“those times without a clock [that] are still within us”, as Bachelard writes
(1960/1971, p. 130). In the film’s opening, as with the film’s other scenes
of train travel, Denis’ conjunction of cinema with the train plays on their
shared capacity to function as a rhythmic, “introspective machine”
(Denis, as cited in Lee, 2009).
Referring to the recurrence of commuter trains in Ozu, Denis has
elsewhere praised the Japanese director’s ability to capture the “private
moment” on screen, a sensibility that also inflects 35 Shots of Rum in
different ways (Denis, as cited in Lee, 2009). Like Lionel, Jo’s first
appearance in the film is preceded by another lilting musical passage (one
of the Tindersticks’ “Train Montage” compositions), devoted to the
dreamlike movement of trains. After entering a tunnel at twilight, a train
exits the same tunnel at nightfall. Other trains whoosh by and shots of
anonymous passengers begin to feature, their faces dimly reflected in the
train’s glass windows like urban ghosts. In the compositions that follow,
long shots revel in the length and light of trains, gliding at night. Filmed
from a distance, the trains appear as floating blocks of orange, blue and
yellow light. In another shot, the camera holds on a train’s rear ditch
lights, trailing red light as it moves off into the darkness. Standing up in a
crowded train carriage, Jo gives a slight smile to herself (anticipating the
rice cooker that she is about to purchase for the household). Denis then
begins to inter-cut between shots of Jo and the other passengers with
coolly tinted, blurred views (filmed from the inside of the train through
its windows). As with other travelling shots affiliated with the train, Denis
imbues this sequence with an alternative tempo and motion: a suggested
mental motion that is occurring within. Similarly, profile shots of Lionel
and René driving the train evoke a shifting intentional focus, flitting
between the levers of the train’s switchboard, the suggestion of passing
inner thoughts and the tracks ahead. Adding to the film’s persistent sense
of introspection is its return to blurred or rushing imagery, mediated
through panes of glass.

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 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

In The poetics of reverie (1960/1971), Bachelard bequeaths us a number

of crucial distinctions between the dream (rêve) and imaginal recreations
of the world (rêverie). Whereas dreams evacuate consciousness (the
“night time dreamer cannot articulate a cogito”; p. 22), reveries are lucid,
waking and thoughtful. Unlike dreams, reveries can occur in the full
“tranquility of the day and in the peace of repose”, bringing with them an
“awakened oneirism” (p. 146). The cogito of reverie is “less lively than the
thinker’s cogito” (p. 167), however. This is because reverie is “lived out in
a relaxed time which has no linking force”, where consciousness “relaxes
and wanders” (p. 5).
By alternating between shots of trains, shots of the trains’ forward
movement and shots of Lionel, Jo, René or other passengers in transit,
Denis conjures up the “different sort of time” and diffusive consciousness
of reverie (Mazis, 2017, p. 136; see also Bachelard, 1960/1971, p. 120).
Through the repetition of glassed views or the lighting up of high-rise
apartment blocks at night, night-time and twilight scenes become
suffused with a strong sense of daydreaming. Following the retirement
party for René, another hypnotic, almost abstract passage occurs.
At first, only the glimmer of outstretched train tracks is visible onscreen.
Soft grey streaks of light then set in (an effect that is created by
Denis filming through the window of a speeding train rushing past low-
key lights underground). Shifting the film’s perspective to one of the
train’s inner carriages, Denis follows this oneiric passage with shots of
the now subdued drinking party. Panning right to left, the camera takes
in Lionel, René and the other workers. Slightly intoxicated, they are
filmed leaning against the train’s seats or propped up against its windows.
All appear lulled to the verge of sleep. As the train slowly pulls into a
station, one of Lionel’s colleagues suddenly looks up. Becoming
increasingly alert, he breaks the serenity of the scene, exiting with
another colleague.
Pockets of rest and repose in reverie should not be confused with night-
time dreaming (Bachelard, 1960/1971, p. 13). Despite her many
evocations of daydreaming, Denis never presents us with sleeping
bodies in 35 Shots of Rum – neither on the train’s carriages, inside the
film’s suburban apartments or, later, during Lionel and Jo’s time by the
sea. As Bachelard himself suggests: “It is a poor reverie that invites a nap”
(1960/1971, p. 10). To my mind, Bachelard’s thinking on the worldly
slippages of reverie and repose offer rich points of connection with Denis’
film and with awakened yet oneiric evocations of movement, rhythm and
pacing in cinema more generally. After all, images are the foundational
“units of reverie” for Bachelard (1960/1971, p. 176) and reveries
themselves are always in motion. Imaginal images can assume ephemeral,

13
 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

dynamic or more deep-seated forms, depending on their make-up.7

Furthermore, the reveries that concern Bachelard are poetically guided
reveries – reveries that are guided by the waking dreams of the writer/poet
(or, as I am suggesting here, the filmmaker). Crucially, reveries depart
from the linear clock time of causality. Through their relaxed rhythm and
pacing, they open up a de-temporalisation of events that seems especially
relevant to the sensuous “drift” of filmmakers like Denis (Bachelard,
1960/1971, p. 111; Martin, 2006). In 35 Shots of Rum, Denis’ lyrical return
to the train conjoins vehicular motion with rest, often depicting bodies in
states of introspection. From a Bachelardian perspective, reveries need not
be attached to imagining characters, however. Reveries can also be borne
from simple objects, an idea that I explore more fully in the next section.

The Rice Cooker: Object-Based Reveries and Reverberation

In The poetics of space, Bachelard’s meditation on intimate spaces and
objects, he asserts “that ‘things’ speak to us and that […] if we give this
language its full value, we have a contact with things” (1958/1994,
p. xxvii). Similarly, in The poetics of reverie, he describes the poet who
dreams before an object as re-organising “the world under the sign
of the object” (1960/1971, p. 154). While Bachelard often invokes
language or the sign, it is important to note that he does not equate the
imagination with signification.8 When Bachelard refers to the imagin-
ation, he is seeking to articulate a much more primal engagement with
the world. That primal contact “has imaginative dimensions within
what is sensed”, whatever it might be (a landscape, a train, an apple,
another human being) (Mazis, 2017, p. 128). If, for Bachelard, poets
are more in touch with this primal mode of speaking it is because
he believes the imagination attends to the “logos of being’s emergence
in the world” and to the sensuous “Word of existence” (Kearney,
1991, p. 101).
In The poetics of reverie, Bachelard devotes an entire chapter to object-
based reveries. In this chapter, “The ‘Cogito’ of the Dreamer”, everyday
objects such as flowers, fruits, a windowpane, a plate or pebbles become
catalysing forces for the imagination. Of particular interest to me with
regard to Denis’ film is how objects provide the structure and impetus of a

7 As I have detailed elsewhere (2020, p. 354), the imagination does not have a fixed mode
in Bachelard’s work as its images depend upon the particular substances that are being
engaged or their imaginative admixtures.
8 The “poetic image is an emergence from language, it is always a little above the language
of signification” (Bachelard, 1958/1994, p. xxvii).

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 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

reverie in Bachelard’s thought. On the centring function of imaginal

objects, the philosopher is worth quoting at length:

Suddenly an image situates itself in the centre of our imagining being. It retains
us; it engages us. It infuses us with being […] A flower, a fruit, or a simple,
familiar object suddenly comes to solicit us to think of it, to dream near it
[….] [O]nce a poet has chosen his object, the object itself changes its being.
It is promoted to the poetic. (1960/1971, pp. 153–154, emphasis added)

Bachelard observes how, once elevated by the poetic, an apple “becomes

the centre of a cosmos, a cosmos where the living is good and one is sure
of the living” (1960/1971, p. 156). When the poet dreams before objects,
unassuming or small-scale objects become the centre of entire worlds –
bringing about new imagined worlds through their texture, shape, colour,
size and scent.
Reflecting on Ozu’s Late Spring, Denis singles out the apple as an
important object and affective carrier of feeling in the film. “I remember
the end with the wedding dress and the father peeling the apple”, she
states; “I think […], [un]til last day of my life, this apple will be something
unspeakable for me” (Denis, as cited in Lee, 2009, emphasis added). In
place of Ozu’s apple, Denis employs the domestic object of a rice cooker
as her means of conveying familial tenderness and intimacy. If for
Bachelard, the “object is […] the reverie companion of the dreamer”
(1960/1971, p. 163), for Denis, the rice cooker is a non-verbal carrier of
feeling and another means of the filmmaker poetically marking time.
According to Denis, the rice cooker acknowledges Ozu’s influence over
the film – a reference that is made explicit when we see Lionel picking up
a pair of apples from the kitchen bench, where the rice cooker often
resides. The rice cooker is also “a sign that [Jo’s’] not ready to go, she still
thinks that they can improve the apartment. She doesn’t think it’s time to
move yet” (Denis, as cited in Davis, 2009). Like Ozu’s apple, the rice
cooker attests to the power of objects to convey feeling outside of language
(what Bachelard understands as the speaking of things). Unlike Ozu’s
apple, though, rice cookers feature multiple times in Denis’ film. Each
time this object appears, it marks out a crucial exchange between father
and daughter, subtly gesturing towards their eventual separation.
The rice cooker first appears in one of the film’s glassed moments.
Through a shop front window, Jo selects a cooker from the shop’s shelves,
decorated with red and blue fairy lights. Her selection appears next to a
larger model – a model that is very similar in size and shape to the bright
red rice cooker that Lionel will purchase. Lifting the lid off a smaller pink-
and-white cooker, Jo assesses its size and volume (an action that is

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

repeated by her father in the film’s poignant closing shot). In the next cut,
Jo arrives home where Denis films her dropping her bag to the floor,
resting a baguette nearby and hiding her new purchase in her room in an
unbroken take. As with many of the film’s hallway scenes, the camera
stays fixed in place here as Jo moves in and out of the frame, turning light
switches on, loading but not yet starting the washing machine. Having
changed into loose-fitting clothing (a mode of dress that both father and
daughter adopt at home), she turns her attention to making dinner. When
Lionel announces his arrival home via the doorbell, she smiles (a gesture
that recalls her fleeting expression on the train). Returning to another
shot of the hallway, Denis shows father and daughter affectionately
greeting each other. Together with the kitchen, the hallway is one of the
main domestic sites through which Denis reveals the comfortable daily
rituals and rhythms of Lionel and Jo.9 Lionel confesses to smoking as Jo
brings him his slippers. The sounds of a pan, sizzling on the stove, softly
filter through the scene. Lionel sits to change his shoes while Jo leans her
back to the wall, arching her toes and watching on.
In extending Bachelard’s thinking on object-based reveries to Denis’
film, it is helpful to consider the influence of the French/Polish
philosopher Eugène Minkowski on Bachelard’s later work, especially
his sensuous concept of reverberation (retentir). First trained as a
psychiatrist, Minkowski shifted towards phenomenological philosophy
around the same time that Bachelard was making his own shift towards
studying the imagination. In his 1936 book, Towards a cosmology,
Minkowski maintains that “scientific knowledge is not the only nor the
privileged way of knowing things and the world” (Kockelmans & Kiesel,
1970, p. 236). For Minkowski, anticipating Bachelard’s own later
thinking, there are two modes of looking at the world: the scientific
and the poetic. The scientific look “wants to see facts in rigorous
objectivity and things in their ‘materiality’”; the poetic, by contrast, “does
not impose any barriers upon itself and lets its glance wander to infinity
to discover in each object an entire world” (1936/1970, p. 239, emphasis
added). Whereas the scientist “dissects, opposes, proceeds by means of
abstraction” (p. 246) (knowing the world via objective, empirical
measurements), the poet embodies a different mode of understanding.
As he puts it, the poet “communicates with the whole universe […] the
atmosphere which reverberates around […] is for [them] everything”
(p. 246).

9 Filmed at a distance with a static camera, Denis’ filming of the hallway doubles and
inverts the railway tracks.

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 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

Employing an auditory metaphor (retentir), Minkowski understands

reverberation as a sounding or a ringing out in time and space. Likening
reverberation to a wellspring inside a sealed vase or the echoing of a
hunting horn through the forest, he suggests that reverberation is also
capable of shifting the “whole tonality of life” (Minkowski, as cited in
Bachelard, 1958/1994, pp. xvi–xvii). Inspired by Minkowski, Bachelard
later articulates the imagination as a sensuous echoing between the
imagining being/poet, the imagined image and the reader.10 For
Minkowski and for Bachelard (1958/1994, p. xvi), reverberation is
indicative of a densely sonorous world, including the non-verbal speaking
of inanimate things and environments.
In 35 Shots of Rum, it is often through décor, domestic objects,
furnishings and settings that Denis captures the reciprocity of Lionel and
Jo. Through their smoothness and their repetition, small-scale, quotidian
moments gain a “remarkable, memorable power”: Jo pinning her hair
back before cooking; Lionel taking his nightly shower before the pair sit
down to eat (Bíró, 2009, p. 40). In one sequence, the camera holds on an
effervescent glass of aspirin as Jo waits for the aspirin to dissolve.
Wordlessly, she hands the glass to her father in bed, where he is
recovering from the previous night’s drinking party. Here, father and
daughter are dressed in similar shades of grey, “a serene palette”
(Wheatley, 2009, p. 41) that is echoed by the rumpled bedding and
walls surrounding them. Growing increasingly aware their time together
will soon end, Denis cuts to a close-up shot of their interlinked hands and
fingers. “Just feel free”, Lionel tells Jo, before she exits, soon after
encountering her romantic love interest Noé (Grégoire Colin).
By attending to the different audio-visual textures that make up Lionel
and Jo’s suburban life, Denis’ film resounds with the “sonority of being”
that Bachelard (1958/1994, p. xvi) associates with reverberation – the
gliding or click-clacking of the trains; the music of the French-Caribbean
station Tropiques FM drifting down the hallway; steam rising from a rice
cooker; the bell-like sounds of wind chimes, hanging from an adjacent
apartment; the humming of their washing machine; the flicking on
and off of light switches in the apartment block; and the clinking of
shots of rum. In considering how Denis’ film reverberates, though, we
might think about reverberation as not only appealing to the auditory
sense but, more importantly, as a sensuous and a formal recurrence
of images, objects, gestures and sounds. As Bachelard neatly explains

10 See also Bachelard’s (1960/1971, p. 70) discussion of the phenomenologist rever-

berating to the image in the sense of Minkowski.

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

( juxtaposing the poetic time of reverberation with causality): “it is in the

opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation […] that we feel the real
measure of the being of a poetic image” (1958/1994, p. xvi, emphasis
added).
Recalling Jo’s previous actions, Lionel initially keeps his gift out of
sight. When he appears in the kitchen with a boxed rice cooker, Jo says
nothing of her own purchase. In the domestic scenes that follow, Denis
cuts back and forth between the blue-and-grey shades of Lionel (changing
in his bedroom) and Jo, clad in a red-and-blue checked shirt in the
kitchen, smiling as she opens and closes the cooker. Upon entering the
kitchen, Lionel adds his own clothes to the washing machine and starts its
cycle (completing an action that Jo had previously delayed, anticipating
her father). Once again, father and daughter are filmed moving quietly
and smoothly in synchronisation with one another.
According to Bachelard (1960/1971, p. 164), when an imagined image
reverberates, it gives rise to a sensuous echoing between things,
encouraging us to perceive and to make connections and correspon-
dences between phenomena (for example, how the pale, rounded shape
of a dinner plate echoes the colour of clouds). When Lionel and Jo sit
down to eat, Denis affirms the pair’s togetherness with each other and
their environs through the formal reverberation of the rice cooker.
In one shot, the red cooker is placed at the centre of the table,
positioned alongside Jo’s simple salad and sliced baguette. Filmed from
the side, Lionel’s gift is now revealed as having a blue-greyish ring that
neatly corresponds with Lionel’s recent change of clothing. As Jo leans
over to sample the rice, the rice cooker chromatically echoes the
costuming of both father and daughter (a colour scheme that was also
hinted at, previously, through the red and blue lights that adorned the
shop window). Making a contented sound, Jo pronounces the rice to be
perfect (a line that affirms the synchronicity of the household and Denis’
association of the rice cookers in the film with time). Lionel and Jo then
take turns serving each other at dinner.
The second appearance of the red rice cooker occurs after Lionel and Jo
have their closest approximation to an argument. Their heated exchange
occurs as a result of impending change and the proposed departure of
Noé. Following René’s suicide, elongated, melancholic strains of the
Tindersticks’ melodica set into the film. Following Lionel’s arrival home,
Denis cuts to a de-populated shot of the cooker, boiling away on the
kitchen bench. Through this small-scale, domestic composition, Denis
recalls one of Ozu’s famous pillow shots as well as philosopher Gilles
Deleuze’s discussion of the “still life” in Ozu (1985/2005, pp. 15–17).
As Deleuze insists, Ozu’s still lives are not at all empty but dense with

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Figure 1: 35 Shots of Rum – The rice cooker, chromatic sympathy and reverberation

meaning. The “presence and composition of objects” functions as its own

container, bringing into relief and “a certain soft focus” the lives of Ozu’s
characters (p. 16). For Deleuze, most importantly, Ozu’s “still life is time”
and a “direct-time image” that foregrounds “all the nuances and relations”
that surround the object/scene (p. 16).11 While also affiliated with the
marking of time, Denis’ rice cookers work slightly differently because of
their repetition and their reverberation. In Denis’ ode to Ozu, Jo has
previously placed a baguette next to the cooker. As the camera’s vision
subtly intends towards the kitchen bench, steam visibly rises from the red
cooker. Sounds of steam escaping from the cooker can also be heard,
signalling the rice is nearly ready (Fig. 2).
Repeating and altering the action of previous scenes, Lionel moves
down the hallway to take his shower. He does not stop to greet Jo,
however. Instead, Denis cuts to a shot of Jo in the hallway’s semi-darkness,
listening out for her father. The following scene features Lionel and Jo
standing up with plates and forks in their kitchen, eating the now-cooked
rice. After Lionel compliments Jo’s cooking, she sets her plate aside,
slowly finishing her chewing. She moves forward, taking Lionel’s plate. As
she hugs her father, the airy sounds of a flute begin (the beginning of the
Tindersticks’ “Lubec” melody). The introduction of this melody signals a

11 Deleuze (1985/2005, p. 16) cites Ozu’s prolonged shot of the vase in Late Spring as a
still life and an example of the time-image: “Ozu’s still lives endure, have a duration,
over ten seconds of the vase […]”.

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

Figure 2: 35 Shots of Rum – Reverberation, the red rice cooker and the passing of time

marked shift in tone. The rice has been cooked and eaten; Jo and Lionel’s
time together in their modest apartment has come to an end. Denis holds
on the pair embracing before making a hard cut to moving vehicles and to
Lionel and Jo on the road to Germany.
The final appearance of the rice cookers in 35 Shots of Rum occurs after
the film’s titular drinking game, where Lionel consumes the fabled
number of rum shots on the occasion of Jo’s marriage (presumably to
Noé). Neatly closing the film, Denis loops back to and echoes the film’s
beginning. More specifically, she returns to Jo’s gift, still wrapped in its
red plastic bag from the store. In the film’s final shot, the camera holds on
the kitchen bench and on Lionel, unwrapping Jo’s small pink-and-white
rice cooker and placing it next to the larger, red model. Knowing, only
now, that Jo had made her own thoughtful purchase for the house, he
reaches out to adjust the lid of Jo’s cooker, setting it back into place – a
gentle action, reminiscent of the gesture of adjusting clothing or tendrils
of hair. Before the film cuts to black, Denis lingers on the two rice cookers
side by side (one large, one small), calling up the intimate doublings of
father and daughter that have recurred throughout the film.
As Bachelard alerts us, an “inanimate object [can] open itself to the
greatest of dreams”, leading us to “reverberate to the object drama” that is
imagined by the poet (1960/1971, p. 164). As with the apple that centres
the poet’s cosmos or Ozu’s Late Spring, Denis’ rice cookers overflow their
own material bounds. As object-based reveries, they become Denis’
means of affectively organising and poetically centring the film. More than

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just structuring and bookending the film, then, rice cookers reverberate
across it (beyond the discrete scenes in which they feature), bringing the
closeness of Lionel and Jo together with the passing of time. To recall and
slightly alter Bachelard’s words, we might say that the simple object of a
rice cooker “represents the [film’s] world” (1960/1971, p. 153). In 35
Shots of Rum, the rice cookers embody a temporality and a tenderness that
exist well beyond this object’s domestic function.

The Child’s Lantern: Charmed Images, Nests and Intensity

Before I turn to the last object under analysis, I should note the objective
depictions of the world that feature in 35 Shots of Rum. As Rosalind Galt
observes, these images pertain to the lived “structures and systems in
which the [train] drivers are embedded” (2014, p. 107). From the
perspective of reverie and repose, these more objective images of the
world also help illustrate the shared thinking of Minkowski and
Bachelard, especially their notion of “charmed” images.
In a chapter titled “Prose and poetry (astronomy and cosmology)” from
Towards a cosmology, Minkowski quotes a passage by Honoré de Balzac in
which a child is nestled under a fig tree, looking up at a star. Having been
missing for a while, the child is later admonished for lingering on the
night sky without any knowledge of astronomy. Too often, for Minkowski,
we fail to look poetically or with joy at the world. Glossing the child’s
curious look, he asks: “may it not happen to us at any age that we look at a
star and find a particular charm in it because it reflects a whole aspect of
our being?” (1936/1970, p. 239). For both Minkowski and Bachelard, the
child and the poet are privileged figures. Significantly, both understand
childhood as something that can be re-discovered or re-captured
throughout life. Both argue for charmed images (the star that charms
the child in Minkowski or “an image that charms and speaks to us” in
Bachelard) as a means of us poetically uniting with the world,
reawakening the reveries of childhood (Minkowski, 1936/1970, p. 239;
Bachelard, 1958/1994, p. 188).
Throughout 35 Shots of Rum, Denis’ charmed imagery and object-based
reveries alternate with a more objective focus on “systems” and “how the
world works” (Lee, 2009). In Jo’s university class, for example, students
debate debt management in the Global South (an issue that Jo argues can
be approached “precisely, rigorously, technically”). Surveillance footage of
Paris’ Gare du Nord station then appears on a television monitor, followed
by a lit-up map of the train network and shots of workers in the station’s
control room. Compare these scenes with the film’s fluid, meditative shots
of Lionel driving the train. Following a conversation between Lionel and
René in the front cabin, the train speeds through a darkened tunnel.

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A profile shot of Lionel at work in the driver’s seat gives way to the
unexpected image of a horse’s hooves, moving across the stones of the
tracks. In this fleeting, fantastical image (a recreation of Goethe’s poem
“Der Erlkönig” by Denis), the sonic rocking of the train combines with
Lionel’s rocking, imagined image of himself and his Jo, riding a horse.
Shot with a freeform, hand-held camera, the sequence is stylistically
distinct from Lionel’s driving or the film’s objective shots of the world.
According to Bachelard, in reverie, a “universe can be born from an
isolated image” (1960/1971, p. 175). Through an image which “has just
charmed” the awakened dreamer, the dreamer inhabits a “unity of reverie,
a unity of world” (p. 175). As Lionel and Jo ride through the wind, the
camera whips about, moving abruptly from Lionel’s hands on the bridle
to shots of the horse’s ears and its whipping mane. Denis then suddenly
cuts back to a suburban train station, returning the film’s focus to the
tracks.
Just as science cannot fully account for the child’s curious look at a star
in Minkowski, objective spatial coordinates cannot map the imagination
in Bachelard. Similarly, for Denis, the systemic operations of the world
(including a map of the RER network) are not the same as a train-based
reverie.12 In re-locating the film’s setting from suburban Paris to the
natural world, Denis employs a series of charmed images to stage another
pivotal sequence in 35 Shots of Rum. To figure the intimate bonds of Lionel
and Jo, their separation and the fleetingness of time itself, she employs
another charged poetic object: the child’s lantern.
In Lübeck, Lionel and Jo brush autumn leaves away from the gravesite
of Jo’s mother. Resting on a nearby bench, they share a hot drink. After the
film cuts to an overhead shot of leaves in the trees, the sound of the wind
picks up, rushing through the scene. An extended shot of beach grass
follows, moved by gusting winds. Re-orienting the film’s previous sense of
scale and location, the view of a sombre toned beach and overcast sky is
seen, framed through the small window of Lionel and Jo’s campervan. By
the seaside in their campervan, Lionel and Jo huddle together against the
winds. Here, Denis once again underscores Lionel and Jo’s synchronicity
through small-scale, intimate and domestic imagery. Inside the van, Jo
washes the dishes, pausing to hand Lionel an opener as he pulls a beer
from the van’s fridge. In the Lübeck scenes, Denis embeds Lionel and Jo’s
togetherness into a larger, environmental sense of diffusion (wind gusts,
falling leaves, the lapping of the sea).

12 The objective and the poetic are not an either/or equation. Via Bachelard and
Minkowski, what I am suggesting is that both systems inform 35 Shots of Rum.

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 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

Writing “of the nest found in natural surrounds”, Bachelard suggests

that the nest typifies calm, rest, quiet and intimacy: the “image of a simple
house” (1958/1994, p. 98). In an interview, Denis has also described
the locations of 35 Shots of Rum as functioning as “a small oasis” for
the film’s characters and a “nest of change” (Denis, as cited in Lee, 2009).
The nest-like qualities of the film take on particular relevance, I believe,
by the seaside in Lübeck. In these moments, Lionel and Jo inhabit a
fragile, temporary space. Through her emphasis on the natural world and
her filming of the lanterns, Denis couples Lionel and Jo’s nest by the sea
with poetic associations of time and mortality, love, wonder and
becoming.
For Bachelard, the nest evokes the “naïve wonder” that we felt as
children upon the unexpected discovery of this dwelling. Whenever we
discover or imagine a nest, “it takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to
a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had” (1958/1994, p. 93).
Through reveries relating to childhood, he writes, we also see the world
anew, the “universe once more [illustrated] with its childhood colours”
(1960/1971, p. 118). Tellingly, Denis introduces the object of the child’s
lantern through the simple, nest-like space of Lionel and Jo’s campervan
(their home for travelling). Washing dishes, Jo’s attention is caught by the
sound of singing children. Lionel joins Jo at the van’s window and
together they watch on as a group of small children make their way
through the dunes. The children are singing and celebrating the German
holiday tradition of Laternelaufen (“Walking with Lanterns”) (Fig. 3).
Formally, the appearance of the children’s lanterns dramatically changes
the film’s colour palette, shifting the film’s colours away from pallid earth
tones (blue, grey, brown, green) towards transient pastels and, soon after,
the striking colours of deep red, gold and stark black.
Beautifully filmed against the falling of pink-tinted light and clouds,
each child carries a glowing paper lantern, held aloft on a long stick. As
the children cross the dunes, one of the children lags behind the others,
toting a lantern that is decorated with red-and-gold leaves.
As James Williams comments, Denis’ filming of the dunes scene is
imbued with an impressionistic, “painterly prettiness” (2009, p. 47). For
Williams, the film’s painterly qualities recall John Singer Sargent’s pink-
tinged depiction of girls lighting lanterns at dusk, made famous by his
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–1886). Given the geographic setting of
northern Germany and Denis’ rendition of Laternelaufen, parallels can
also be drawn with the atmospheric paintings of Northern European
artists, depicting the same festival (Fig. 4). More than just a painterly
moment, though, the lantern parade can be understood as a charmed
image and another instance of reverberation.

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

Figure 3: 35 Shots of Rum – The children’s passing lantern procession

As articulated both by Minkowski and by Bachelard, reverberation is

premised upon something that exists beyond “the mundane and palpable
world [and] that calls us out of our ordinary selves” (Wright, 2017, p. 44).
Unlike trains or rice cookers, lanterns feature briefly in the Lübeck
sequence. They have an immediate, “poetic effect”, however, in the special
way that Bachelard understands a charmed image. That is, the object of
the child’s lantern “immediately stands out” from all that surrounds it
(captivating attention on and off screen), bringing together an intimate
image or space with the connotation of something much larger
(1958/1994, p. 196).13 As is befitting of a moment of reverberation,
Denis’ filming of the lantern parade in the dunes generates formal and
sensuous correspondences, echoing past scenes and moments in the film
and its intimations of the future. Combined, the fading light, the lagging
child and their leaf-covered lantern reverberate with the autumn leaves of
the previous graveyard scene (suggesting death and mortality), Lionel and
Jo’s nest-like time by the sea (an image of love and intimacy), and Jo’s
reluctance to leave the family nest (Lionel).
As the children move towards the horizon, the slow sounds of a flute
can be heard, reminiscent of the melody that played over the family
kitchen scene. This time, the flute belongs to another dedicated
composition by the Tindersticks, “Lanterns”. It intermingles with the

13 As an example, Bachelard (1958/1994, p. 196) invokes the term “vast” in Baudelaire’s

poetry as it stands apart from other words to captivate attention.

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 Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum

Figure 4: Lantern Parade in Snow (Anne Sophie Petersen, c. 1890–1900)

sounds of the coastal wind and the children’s song. Cutting to another set
of children toting rounded lanterns and another lantern parade, Denis’
film begins to take on an increasingly bittersweet tone. The children’s
singing has cut out, replaced by the touching yet elegiac “Lanterns”.
As the children move forward in blue-tinted light (inhabiting the in-
between of twilight and nightfall), they swing flickering lanterns. Their
lanterns glow red, amber and gold, creating the glimmering effect of
bouncing brightly-coloured orbs.
In The poetics of space and The poetics of reverie, Bachelard describes how
the imagination can transform objects and their surroundings, endowing
them with associations or affective qualities that exceed their objective
size, shape and dimension. Through their dimension-changing possibi-
lities, intimately imagined images (a nest, a child’s lantern) can bring
about wondrous, even world-expanding moments. Through intensity in
the “intimate domain”, Bachelard writes, we often experience an
“intensity of being” (1958/1994, p. 193). For Bachelard, intensity is
very much a temporal concept. It is premised upon change and transition:
the “intensity of a being evolving” (p. 193).
Inspired by Bachelard’s writing, Kristupas Sabolius suggests that a
moment of reverberation can not only alter our perception of things but
change our own internal, rhythmical settings. A “single and immediate
image can touch the whole world” through its evocations of an “echoing

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 Film-Philosophy 27 (2023)

musicality” (2012, p. 111). Following the second children’s lantern

parade, Denis returns to Lionel and Jo, outside their campervan. Night
has now fallen. Denis films the pair frontally, with Lionel and Jo’s heads
occupying the centre of the frame.
Through the shot’s unusual composition, also engulfed by night, Denis
formally underscores the nest-like qualities of Lionel and Jo’s campsite.
Bundled up in their sleeping bags, Lionel and Jo make a curved nest for
themselves in the dunes. A thick darkness pervades the frame, yet they
remain visible. The normally taciturn Lionel then begins to hum, carrying
on the song of the children. Responding to her father’s humming, Jo
imagines “we could live like this forever”, knowing all the while that
stopping time would be impossible.
As Bachelard reminds us, a nest is very much a “precarious thing” –
there is “a lost intimacy” and “an alas in [its] song of tenderness”
(1958/1994, pp. 100–102). Through her filming of the children’s lantern
parades and their aftermath (Lionel and Jo, nestled in the dunes), Denis
creates a series of charmed images that are entrenched in intimate
intensity. In the Lübeck sequence, especially, Lionel and Jo’s sojourn is
shot through with intimations of childhood wonder and familial love,
while also evoking a resounding sense of loss, fragility and human
precariousness, like fleeting light, wind and fragments of song.
From her opening re-configuration of the traditional point-of-view shot,
Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum attends to the expressivity of décor, objects and
their surroundings. In this regard, her filmmaking hearkens to “the
indirect voices of things perceived”, a hearkening that is also character-
istic of Bachelard’s philosophy (Mazis, 2016, p. 260). By returning to the
restful, rhythmic imagery of trains and tracks or bodies seen introspect-
ing, Denis lends cinematic form to Bachelardian states of reverie and
repose. In extending Bachelard’s writings to the cinema, we need not
delimit reverie to the depiction of characters daydreaming (as with
Lionel’s imagining of himself and Jo on horseback). Through her poetic
use of objects – trains, rice cookers and lanterns – Denis embeds object-
based reveries into the film’s rhythm, structure and form. As I have
detailed, Denis’ poetic objects reverberate through their formal and
sensuous recurrence, their centring function and their evocations of an
intimate intensity.
For a film that is so often described by critics as “subtle”, “gentle”,
“tender”, “patient” and “steady”, it is remarkable how often scenes of
togetherness, companionship and rest are disrupted, however. Like the
hard cut that puts an end to the joyous “Nightshift” sequence, the
tranquillity of Denis’ film frequently cedes to bursts of audio-visual
disruption – Noé’s window left open, banging at night; the taxi that

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breaks down on the way to the concert; René’s suicide, stopping Lionel’s
train on its tracks; the sounds of a coffee pot bubbling over Lionel and Jo’s
seaside holiday, bringing with it the morning of Jo’s wedding day. If
reverie and repose encourage wellbeing, as Bachelard (1960/1971, p. 182)
proposes, then 35 Shots of Rum repeatedly cuts its own peacefulness short.
By repeating the stop-start motions of reverie itself, Denis’ film powerfully,
poetically reverberates – recalling those moments in which we find
ourselves jolted out of pleasant daydreams.

ORCID
Saige Walton https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5213-2484

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