Denis’ Films Deconstruct Racial Dynamics

“White Material,” the latest film by internationally celebrated director Claire Denis, opens with a vision of violent apocalypse. The house of French plantation owner Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) burns down, along with the dead and living bodies left inside—a bleak opening sequence to a troubling film.

Denis addressed the film’s central themes at the Harvard Film Archive on January 28, where a discussion with the director followed a screening of the work. Afterwards, Denis presented a short documentary “Aller au Diable” (To the Devil) about her trip to South America in preparation for a future project. Both films explored ideas central to Denis’ body of work: issues of race, culture, and control.

Set in an unnamed country in Africa, “White Material” follows Vial’s headstrong refusal to leave her land despite an impending of civil war. Playing in counterpoint with her early breakout “Chocolat,” Denis in “White Material” continues to confront the instability and imprecision of identity in the aftermath of imperialism. The former film ended with a black man whose American origin deters him from truly assimilating to his new home in Africa. The latter finds the problematic destiny of Vial’s African-born white son: “This is his country…but it doesn’t like him,” utters a character in the film.

The film “has its roots in the early work that she was doing. It also has its roots in the filmmakers she was beginning to work with, [like] Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders. Cinema is very much about this idea of the fluidity between ideas about the nation,” said HFA director Haden R. Guest.

The film also addresses violent conflict on racial lines: “white material” is an epithet that categorizes the white man as “other,” and the Vial tribe suffers from their distinction. “They have a sort of cowardice to pretend they are not in danger, as if they were invincible, protected by their whiteness.... [Vial] thinks nobody is going to touch her property. She is wrong, of course. She is not protected by her color,” Denis said in the discussion.

Abby P. Sun ’13, a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator who attended the screening, said of the work, “It wasn’t disturbing in a sense of blood and gore; it’s disturbing thematically. Claire Denis doesn’t shy away from the things that are very disturbing: genocide, race, and class warfare.”

Throughout her cinema, Denis has also drawn out the visceral, fragile nature of human life. Whether through the physicality of the soldiers in “Beau Travail” or the tragic suicide in “35 Rhums,” people are mortal bodies in Denis’ work, hanging by a thread at all times. “White Material” is no exception. In one scene, Vial’s blond son is chillingly stripped bare by two child rebels, and the image of his shining ivory skin becomes the film’s central emblem—the white material of the title. Identities in Denis’ works are tied to an irreducible corporeality.

The film abounds with textures and sensory experiences, a personal mark Denis has used to immense effect in her other works. During the discussion, the director explained a scene where two child rebels root through the possessions of the Vial estate: “The smell of the bathroom, soft and fresh materials—.films are made also of [these] impressions that are very difficult to write.”

Denis also emphasized the sensitivity of the young soldiers in the film, making the violence they effect and experience all the more disturbing. “They are not innocent; it is naïve to say innocent, but they were the victim of the story. They were hurt.” Denis said.

According to HFA director Guest, the filmmaker herself turned away from watching a climactic scene involving the slaughter of several child soldiers: “She couldn’t watch that scene. She said ‘I can’t watch it; it’s just so horrible.’”

Following the discussion of “White Material,” Denis introduced “Aller au Diable,” which featured her interviews with illegal gold miner Jean Bena. The film incorporated an array of Denis’ usual obsessions: the people and places born out of intertwining diasporas, the tension against authority and foreign control, and the perseverance and day-to-day experience of the poor.

Perhaps most evident in the work was Denis’ fondness for strange locales. She has often dealt with surreal geographies, such as the harsh and vaporous landscapes of “Beau Travail” and “Chocolat.” Yet “Aller au Diable,” which takes place between Surinam and French Guiana, revealed possibly the strangest of Denis’ landscapes in her documentation of Bena’s esoteric techniques for gold mining.

“She’s really interested in what it’s like to be a stranger, what it means to be foreign in a place and the different complexities and nuances of being a stranger,” Sun said. The best of Claire Denis’ films capture these rich relations of man and his context, from the local to the geopolitical and historical.