Walking Tall
Eileen G’Sell Revisits White Material
“Extreme blondness brings bad luck…blue eyes are troubling,” says Chérif (William Nadylam) to a white woman after her son has shaved his head, grabbed a gun, and stolen her motorbike. As the African mayor caresses her hair from the backseat of a cab escaping an unnamed town in an unnamed country in the midst of civil war, the comment comes off as both cautionary and flirtatious—a tension of the type for which director Claire Denis is known and celebrated. In the French auteur’s 2009 White Material, contradiction reigns. Its heroine, Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), is the middle-aged daughter of a coffee plantation baron, and refuses to vacate her ailing father’s land when implored to do so by the French military. Considering herself a native no different than any other, as her Black workers flee and her ex-husband panics, Maria sets out to hire a new crew of laborers to harvest the crop before it’s too late. “You put yourself in an unreal position,” one of her most loyal servants tells her late in the film. “You think you really fit in, but you’ve never wondered how those around you see you.”
Once a staunch Denis defender, I’ve hesitated over the last few years around the filmmaker’s representation of whiteness, admittedly due to reckoning with my own privilege as a white leftist feminist. Writing on last year's Both Sides of the Blade, which is set in Paris and features a multi-racial cast, I argued that “it is around ideas of racial privilege that [the film] fails to slice into anything meaningful.” I claimed that “[w]hereas White Material, among other Denis films, exposes white ignorance to implicitly indict it, Both Sides never manages to do so.” I took similar fault with Stars at Noon, based on the 1986 Denis Johnson novel. Denis sets the film in pandemic times, rather than the revolutionary Nicaragua of the book, leading to what I saw as a convoluted representation of Central American conflict. The problems of brown Central Americans seemed immutable and interchangeable, mere backdrop for the existential and psychological turmoil endured by a white female protagonist. While the film would “surely sate the most ravenous of Denisian appetites for gritty foreign tumult,” I reasoned, “just as erotic power is a matter of particulars, so too is a political climate the outcome of specifics.”
My ambivalence about her last two films has led me to wonder: is it possible that Denis’s earlier work was equally fraught? Was I so blindsided by my eagerness for a prolific female auteur—and a complicated heroine—that I was less keen to notice whatever flaws may surface? Was Denis’s depiction of white privilege in postcolonialist Africa any more conscientious, or was I the unconscientious one, awestruck through the end of the somber credits? Or was this a false binary to begin with, given that consciousness of privilege, or lack thereof, is often a matter of degree, one subject to larger cultural awakenings that give rise to individual self-knowledge? White Material is a film that defies tidy moral categorization, the type of film that warrants revisitation and contemplation years later—not only to assess its potential oversights but also the ways in which our grasp of representation, and its inherent complexities, must keep on evolving.
While I’ve never before explored White Material at length as a critic, I have consistently referred to it in reviews of other Denis films as the gold standard of her oeuvre, such that a superlative assessment of the film can be cumulatively inferred. It is the first Denis film I remember seeing, the first and last to leave me speechless. As in most of her films, an eerie meditative quality looms, prioritizing atmosphere and affect over narrative and dialogue. Her work is often dubbed “poetic” for its fruitfully disjunctive imagery, made more cogent via languorous long takes disrupted by sharp, quick cuts. Denis is a classic auteur in the sense that none of her films feel like they could work as anything but films (though several are based on novels).
I’m too young to remember the buzz over her debut film, Chocolat (1988), a semi-autobiographical reflection on her Cameroonian upbringing and relationship with an African servant. I didn’t start seeing art-house films till 2001, when I took an Intro to Cinema class in college, so also, until recently, missed the lauded Beau travail (1999), an image-driven riff on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd set in Djibouti. Since beginning to take film writing seriously in 2015, I’ve reviewed Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) and High Life (2018) favorably for their bold depictions of messy, sexual women. Despite their starkly different genres and tones, both films feature Juliette Binoche as desirous and desirable well into her fifties, something all too rare on our screens.
Though there is no sex in White Material, Huppert pulses with an unfiltered sensuality: the camera lingers over her freckled, sweating skin. As are many of Denis’s protagonists, Maria is so morally tricky that she sticks with you for years. Among her virtues, Maria boasts resourcefulness and nerve, rebellious to state authority yet devoted to tending her property as a form of both filial duty and devotion to her homeland. Fifty-four when she played the role, Huppert is a hatless, scrappy riposte to the archetype of white feminine fragility. She steers tractors and trucks, mounts dirt bikes, and hauls gigantic baskets of coffee berries. She buries a grave for a bloody goat head with her bare hands. She’s tiny and mighty and easily emasculates both her milquetoast ex and tramp-stamped son. “I’m a good fighter,” she tells one of her many Black servant workers, justifying her decision not to leave her land. “In France I would get too comfortable.”
It’s tempting to lionize Huppert’s Maria in this role specifically because she flouts gender and body tropes with a confidence as giant as her frame is not. And how easy it is, in such a context, to ignore the ways in which Maria’s fearlessness as a woman makes her no less complicit in the white supremacy that undergirds colonialism and its aftermath.
We’re not accustomed to seeing tiny white women move through the world in such an unapologetic, unflinching manner, especially through Black spaces labeled dangerous specifically because some white lady happens to hover somewhere in the vicinity. There are predecessors in the Hollywood canon, of course: Holly Hunter’s hypercompetent producer in Broadcast News (1987); Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991); Renee Zellweger’s Southern farmer in Cold Mountain (2003). These roles garnered Foster and Zellweger their second and first Oscars, respectively, and Hunter her first nomination. As with Huppert, there’s a way in which these actors’ slight physiognomy serves to amplify their indefatigability.
Hunter is 5’2, Zellweger is 5’4; Huppert is, like me, 5’3, and arguably the most waif-like. Watching her rig a generator or fix a water line in White Material is transfixing. I thought so when I first saw the film in an old house in St. Louis I’d just purchased with my life savings. I was 29, learning to retile a kitchen after being suddenly dumped by an unemployed architect living in his mother’s house in suburban Detroit. Huppert’s flinty nature held special appeal to me—perhaps because of my Midwestern, DIY roots, or perhaps because she was small, white, and seemingly fearless. Or, at least, I liked to imagine as much, as I might have about myself.
When, in 2017, Huppert’s film Madame Hyde was featured at the New York Film Festival, I jumped at the chance to interview the actor. The film was underwhelming, but Huppert as incandescent as ever (literally: her character set things afire). Reflecting on that interview now, it’s evident to me how much I projected my own longings onto not only the roles she played but also Huppert herself. Take this question, in which I mentioned White Material as an example: “A lot of your characters, even when victimized on screen, ultimately take accountability, no matter the situation. For many, you have come to represent a character that can be strong no matter what.”
“Strong no matter what.” In Maria’s case, no matter if her plantation (yes, a plantation) is overridden with African rebels all too eager to wag their pistols at her face? No matter if her son’s a lunatic who can’t lift a finger to tend the crop? No matter if her country, which her ancestors brutally colonized, is utterly aflame?
As for accountability, what strikes me now is how utterly unaccountable and inculpable Maria Vial sees herself. She seethes at the “dirty whites” ruining her country with their “nouveau riche” ways, but she is arguably no less corrupt for her inherited wealth and farmhand skills. Denis exposes Maria’s hypocrisy, while insisting at the same time that she remain in our sympathies. Early in the film, Maria asks one of her Black workers why he’s taking off, as though they are the same predicament, as though her ability to get her hands and hair dirty dilutes her privilege in any way. “It came for you and your family, not for us,” he responds, speaking of the French military helicopter that sputtered over the Vial property. “Coffee’s coffee. Not worth dying for.” And yet Maria remains nonplussed.
If anything, her degree of “courage,” as many critics called it upon the film’s release, is only evidence of monstrous self-absorption, her belief that somehow she is above the horrors of civil war, that somehow her crop is more important than her own life and those of her workers. Identifying with Maria in 2009, I looked past much of her entitled arrogance, so seduced was I by Huppert’s primal performance and the film’s haunting score and scenography. In capturing Huppert as an indomitable agent trying to protect her land all on her own, at times Denis herself seems enamored of her delusional heroine’s fierce independence. It can be hard to tell who’s more blinkered—Maria as a character or the film itself.
*****
Denis herself is taller than Huppert and me, but shares a petite frame and edgy demeanor. She wears black leather jackets with punk-rock grommets. She gives fewer fucks than interviews. In her 2010 interview on White Material with Criterion, she seems keenly aware of, and sympathetic to, the plight of African nations aiming to wrest control of their economies in the postcolonial era, foregrounding her collaboration cowriting the script with French-Senegalese author Marie NDiaye. NDiaye, for her part, has emphasized elsewhere in interviews that Denis is “more African than [she] was,” given that the director grew up in Cameroon versus NDiaye’s Paris. “[White Material] is not my story but Claire’s, and she had it all sketched out fairly exactly in her head,” the novelist told The White Review in 2021. “I didn’t come up with any of the characters, and my participation was more technical than creative.”
That the film represents Denis’s singular vision of postcolonial Africa is clear. Inspired partly by Doris Lessing’s 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing, which takes place in South Africa before World War II, Denis decided to set White Material in contemporary times given the then recent civil war in Cote D’Ivoire, where there were “still a lot of French coffee growers” living in the north. Shooting the film in Cameroon with a Cameroonian crew, Denis hoped “this film...would take me out of my childhood, nostalgic memories.”
In unsentimentally reflecting Africa, Denis succeeded. But what of “exposing white ignorance to implicitly indict it,” as I’d claimed in the past? And white ignorance to what, exactly? Black suffering? Black death? To that end, the number of murdered Black bodies we witness in this movie’s first twenty minutes is startling: a rebel leader blankly staring up at his hideout’s ceiling, a pastor abandoned to rot after shot in the back in his own chapel, six colorfully clothed figures with their faces pressed to the dusty ground. In the film’s final chapter, the body count at least doubles, and includes no small amount of child soldiers, whose deaths are aestheticized in a surreally quiet, detached way, minimizing our sense of any fear or anguish. With rare exception, we are encouraged to identify with and so empathize with the white subject, often one grappling with the daily exigencies (and existential maladies) of being one of only a few white subjects around.
Is it wrong for a white French filmmaker to depict so many dead Black bodies on screen? Does my ethical discomfort stem from the number of people depicted? The abstracted, “poetic” manner in which Black violence and death are conveyed? Might my white discomfort itself be part of Denis's goal? Fifteen years after seeing White Material, I don’t have a definitive answer to these questions, but I raise them to acknowledge my early reticence to challenge the decisions made by a canonical female auteur, a reticence I suspect was not mine alone.
Black scholars like Christina Sharpe, Leila Weefur, and Michael Boyce Gillespie have written extensively on the necessarily fraught nature of Black death in contemporary cinema. To the extent that it matters (and I appreciate that, by my being white, to some it will not), I do believe that it is possible for white artists to depict Black death in a way that is not only permissible but arguably progressive (David Simon’s The Wire, for instance). I agree with Cuban-American artist and critic Coco Fusco, who, in the wake of controversy at the Whitney Biennial over an abstract painting of the murdered Emmett Till by white artist Dana Schutz, claimed “the argument that any attempt by a white cultural producer to engage with racism via the expression of Black pain is inherently unacceptable forecloses the effort to achieve interracial cooperation, mutual understanding, or universal anti-racist consciousness.”
Is Denis aspiring to any of these three goals? Perhaps not, which doesn’t dilute the power of her trenchant observations of the scale of Black death during civil war. But I’m not sure her film necessarily expresses what Fusco calls “Black pain” either, given that we rarely are presented with Black characters in physical or psychological distress. We see them impassively demanding money at road checks, fleeing the plantation, and angrily waving guns and machetes around. We see Black children soldiers delight when they discover a canteen of European junk food, gorging themselves on galettes and gummy bears before passing out from sugar coma. What we don’t see are Black people deliberating on how to survive, hiding from rebel or government soldiers, or mourning the loss of a child or spouse. While excessive demonstrations of suffering could potentially feel exploitative as well—postcolonial poverty porn—it’s unfortunate that we don’t get to know at least one complex Black character whose predicament we are forced to reckon with as much as Maria Vial’s.
To the extent that White Material is a brilliant film, it is a film authored by a white woman for an audience of mostly white people. But it is also a film that, in its overt English title and intermittent gestures to Maria’s cluelessness, calls out whiteness as both commodified object and subjectivity that, often enough, is blind to its own harmful and “frightening” nature. “What is that?” one rebel soldier asks another who has filched a gold-plated lighter from the Vial house. “Nothing,” is the response. “Just white material.” To the extent that Denis holds her heroine to a level of accountability—even if she might not hold herself to it as fully—the film retains a measure of brilliance that her latest works lack. Even as White Material distracts from the reality of structural violence with the carnage depicted between Black Africans, Denis does not let the legacy of colonialism go unacknowledged. “As for the white material, the party’s over,” declares a rebel radio DJ toward the film’s unforgettable climax. “No more cocktails on shaded verandas, while we sweat water and blood.”