Review: White Material
Claire Denis is a true cinephile’s director. The richness of any Claire Denis film lies in the small moment-to-moment details that critics love elaborating on: the telling gesture, the stray glance. While this is equally true of Denis’s latest film, White Material, the danger of such an approach – this cataloguing of small moments – lies in too readily abandoning any articulation of larger schemata within a particular film. One is tempted to describe a Denis film merely as an ambiguous series of beautiful and unsettling moments and call it a day. But this is unlikely to tell us very much about how White Material works. Far from being simply an ambiguous series of events, in White Material Claire Denis presents us with some compelling, concrete ideas about the world we live in.
We can say that there are perhaps two kinds of cinema at work in White Material. The first has to do with a kind of blindness. The film’s narrative concerns an unspecified African region torn apart by civil war and the unwillingness of Maria, a white plantation owner, to abandon her coffee farm. As played by Isabelle Huppert, Maria is a marvelously complex character – admirable, yes, in her strength and determination yet also defined by a willful ignorance. Maria insists that the departing French army’s warnings of violence are overblown, she dismisses ominous signs such as a suspicious power outage and she is oblivious to the rapid mental deterioration of her son, Manuel (Nicolas Dubauchelle). Denis employs all kinds of formal devices to invite us into Maria’s mindset: maddeningly tight framing, elliptical editing, shallow depth of focus. The camera relentlessly follows Maria while denying us the wider shot that would give us a clearer idea of the nature of the social conflict in which she is embroiled. We come to learn the basic contours of the conflict – between the militia, rebels and the white landowners left over from the region’s colonial past – through off-hand snippets of conversation and the pronouncements of the DJ heard intermittently on portable radios, but for the most part we are in the dark. Is this not the same kind of blindness that fuels today’s political complacency? Doesn’t the universal support for the “war on terror” in Afghanistan depend on a willful blindness towards the geopolitical tensions that animated the region pre-2001? Didn’t President Obama’s recent claim to have “broken the back of the recession” depend on a willful blindness of his country’s high rates of home foreclosures and long-term unemployment? Every film has its blind spots of course. The fantasies sold by Hollywood, for example, depend to a large extent on ignoring social discord. But the general tactic for dealing with the ideologically necessary blind spot is to “fill the gap” – the suburban utopia of Toy Story 3, for example, is completely implausible but it’s nevertheless a very convincing world. Denis’s cinema, on the other hand, distinguishes itself for while White Material is a film of ellipses, it is her deliberate formal decisions that render these ellipses troubling and problematic.
The second aspect of White Material moves in an opposite and almost incompatible direction for it is based in a sheer clarity of vision. While one element of White Material deliberately obscures a concrete understanding of the regional politics, another element is keenly focused on minute details. The film’s title is a reference to a phrase used by the rebel soldiers in one scene. A child is playing with an ostentatious gold lighter. An older soldier accusingly asks him where he found it. A third soldier interjects, deflating the situation: “It’s just white material”. The camera’s gaze collects a whole inventory of such white material from the very opening frames: the couch set in Maria’s living room, a necklace, mantel piece ornaments, Manuel’s blond locks that he shaves off in order to “become black”. What is this obsession with objects? It is, perhaps, that Denis is suggesting that the aftereffects of colonialism are not merely found in the persistence of white land ownership but lie in the ideology of objects left behind and the social framework that is colonialism’s legacy. In another scene, Maria’s ex-husband (Christophe Lambert) visits a corrupt black government official who lives in an opulent house to sell the coffee plantation. We see the official sitting his young daughter on his lap with a bottle of Fanta (yet another object). “Is this what you want?” he asks her. “This is my Fanta,” she proclaims.
One of the necessary aims of political resistance is to uncover the absurdity of the dominant culture that presents itself as the natural order of things. In 1970, a few nights before being arrested, Howard Zinn gave a talk entitled “The Problem is Civil Obedience” whose opening lines read: “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy turvy; that things are all wrong; that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail; that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power”. Likewise, Denis has been successful before in depicting the topsy turvy nature of the dominant culture. Who can forget that sequence in Beau Travail, the group of Foreign Legion soldiers running around an abandoned building fighting an invisible enemy like a bunch of schizophrenics while a group of local Muslim women look on in amusement? As Beau Travail and White Material suggest, this resistant mode of seeing is natural to the black characters by way of their historic social position. It is one of Maria’s black workers who must tell her that, “Coffee is coffee. Not worth dying for.” What is equally clear is that this mode of seeing is not something that can’t and shouldn’t be appropriated by progressives of every colour and nationality. In this sense, Claire Denis is not unlike the psychotic Manuel who turns out surprisingly successful in his becoming-black – joining the local rebel group, looting the wares of white landowners and sharing the spoils.
