There, in the desert, he drilled raw recruits while quietly nurturing feelings of respect and love for his superior, Forestier (Michel Subor, who in 1960 played a character by the same name in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat). Then, with the arrival of Sentain (Grégoire Colin), a popular soldier Forestier honoured for bravery, Galoup caved in to resentment, envy and hate…

Though little is spelt out explicitly in this elliptical tale of repressed emotion leading to murderous jealousy, the film is admirably accessible and clear throughout. Unlike Melville, Denis shows scant interest in the new recruit as an angelic incarnation of goodness - her concerns are with how a wide-open colonial outpost may become a prison; how men may cope with an all-male society; how the physical may mirror the metaphysical. Hence, she and her team create a fixed, timeless world of mysterious, balletic rites, rippled with simmering homoerotic tensions; an elemental domain of sun, sky, sand, body heat and crabbed, primitive movement.

The intensity of mood and thematic resonance both derive almost wholly from the poetic juxtaposition of music (there’s little dialogue, and only one sporadic voice-over) and Agnés Godard’s stunning images of surpassing beauty and sustained, even surreal strangeness. It’s a masterpiece; prepare to be blown away.

I was absolutely unfit for anything else. Cinema appeared to be a territory where I could survive. In Beau Travail Galoup says he’s "unfit for civilian life". Well, when I came to France after having lived in Africa I felt I was unfit for life! The directors working then who interested me were Godard, Bresson, Antonioni and, later, Fellini. But I was just a spectator – I didn’t imagine that one day I would make a film.

Not classical because I ‘m not French but a daughter of Africa. I grew up in Africa where there were no cinemas so I discovered cinema late, at 14 or 15 years old, all at once and indiscriminately. Cinephilia, in the classic sense of the Cinémathéque and Cahiers Du Cinema, was something I came to much later, perhaps when I was 25 years old.

It’s a bit romantic. I feel like a bit of a foreigner, but I know I’m French. When I was very young I regretted this, I wanted to be anything but French.

I always thought of Herman Melville as a brother in the sense of sharing his feelings of sadness, nostalgia and disappointment, the sense of having lost something. For me Africa is like the seas Melville missed so much.

Rivette has principles rather than methods and these are less his own than those of the directors he admired: Renoir and Rossellini.. Perhaps these principles have to do with duration, sequence-shooting, rewriting during the shooting and never considering the screenplay as complete.

Yes. I need to write a well-worked-out screenplay but I also need to be able to modify it, to separate myself from it during the shoot. I’m not proud of this – it’s not a method I’d recommend but it’s my own way of being adventurous and for me a shoot has to be an adventure. If it’s too comfortable I feel it’s not cinema. There has to be an element of risk.

Yes. With the camera. I hate it if it’s all worked out in advance. Sometimes when I write the screenplay I’ll have certain shot breakdowns in my head but I can never think of them as final. I need to remake them in the shooting, which lends that element of risk. It’s the same when I’m shooting sequence shots - I don’t shoot cutaways or coverage. It’s idiotic, but it’s my way of feeling alive during the filming.

I want to share what’s troubling me, to convey that to others. If there wasn’t this slightly insane desire to share things that are fleeting I think I’d change jobs, write books or plays. No other art form is as simultaneously trivial, vulgar and sublime as cinema. The film industry lives for the idea of profit, so how can one have an approach that’s as egotistical as wanting to share with an audience something that’s an intuition, a fragment? Yet real cinema is a way of transforming the technical and industrial material and making the sublime coincide with it. And I think sensuality is the key. Cinema cannot exist except through eroticism. The position of the spectator is like a kind of amorous passivity and hence is highly erotic.

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