Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis

Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis:... http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/09/foreign-bodies-community-... Kath Dooley … if my films have a common link, maybe it’s being a foreigner – it’s common for people who are born abroad – they don’t know so well where they belong. It’s not the kind of thing you find in literature, music or photography – being from abroad makes you look different. – Claire Denis [1] Having grown up in Africa as the daughter of a French civil servant, French writer/director Claire Denis was positioned as an outsider. Whereas this status was clearly marked by her skin colour in early life, returning to France as a teenager also presented challenges in terms of foreignness and identification – despite it being the country where she was born, and of which she is a citizen. Douglas Morrey posits that ‘in the filmmaking of Claire Denis, the body is the limit between sense and world. The body is always other – the means by which the other appears to me but also by which I am revealed to myself, as other’. [2] This statement has resonance not just for the director’s choice of themes, but also for her stylistic choices: the use of cinematography, sound and editing to explore the intersections of foreign bodies. Martine Beugnet makes the point that Denis’ ‘perception of the Other is always complex and ambiguous’, and is ‘that which spurs curiosity and creates desire’. [3] As such, rather than reinforcing binary oppositions that seek to stigmatise, the director is subtle in her questioning of the effects of dominant cultures in multicultural contexts. Foreign bodies are presented, not so much with the intention of defining difference, but as a means of accessing other worlds, and questioning one’s perception of self. Denis offers us tales of characters with complex and/or traumatic cultural and personal back stories, exploring the French postcolonial landscape, be it in Paris or an African setting. This article seeks to examine the concept of foreignness, as articulated across the films White Material (2009) and Beau Travail (Good Work, 1999) – both of which explore conflict in African settings – and in the urban Parisian drama 35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum, 2008). The Oxford Dictionary defines foreign as an adjective meaning ‘strange or unfamiliar’, that includes elements that are ‘of, from, in, or characteristic of 1 of 11 28/09/2016 11:00 AM Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis:... http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/09/foreign-bodies-community-... a country or language other than one’s own’. The noun foreignness can be used to identify the feeling associated with these elements; both words derive their meaning from the Latin foris, meaning ‘outside’. In terms of the human race, I define foreignness as the name given to the characteristics that make a person appear strange or unfamiliar: physical factors, such as gender, skin or eye colour, or behavioural differences drawn from ‘other’ cultural norms, social and/or language traditions. As a pronoun, ‘other’ can be defined as ‘that which is distinct from, different from, or opposite to something or oneself’. I believe the concepts of ‘foreignness’ and ‘the other’ underpin Denis’ work as a writer/director and that her presentations of them are complex. Writing on the representation of humans identified as ‘white’ in his ground-breaking text of the same name, Richard Dyer makes the point that ‘to represent people is to represent bodies’. [4] Taking a cue from this author, I analyse the portrayal of bodies in the three chosen films. I will refer to Dyer’s key work on the representation of whiteness and to the work of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, who, in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media ‘try to address overlapping multiplicities of identity and affiliation’ rather than ‘recreat[e] neat binarisms’ such as black/white or male/female. [5] Following on from Dyer’s work, Gwendolyn Foster makes the point that ‘the cinema has been remarkably successful at imposing whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes the inherent instability of such arguably artificial binaries as male/female, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, classed/not classed’. [6] By examining Denis’ portrayal of bodies from a variety of different cultural backgrounds, I will argue that, in films such as Beau Travail, 35 Rhums and White Material, Denis has moved away from the cinematic representation described by Foster. Finally, I will approach the complex topic of otherness and postcoloniality by looking at the specific area of trauma and the body, with reference to the theories of Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, and exploring questions of a psychological nature: specifically, how bodies contain and transfer experience and knowledge of individual and/or shared trauma. Postcolonial shame: White Material In a recent interview with the filmmaker, Andrew Hussey notes: Denis read [Frantz] Fanon when she was about fourteen and […] what she found most humbling in his work was his analysis of the degrading effect of the shame and humiliation, which infect coloniser and colonised alike. ‘I understood that humiliation was the important feeling that people had in this relationship’, she says, ‘and this is on both sides, black and white’. [7] This theme is explored most recently in White Material, a story set in an unnamed African country, where Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) struggles to save her family’s coffee plantation in the midst of civil war and racial unrest. As her business and family unit crumbles, Maria makes a connection with le Boxeur (Isaach De Bankolé), a wounded African resistance leader, now hiding from both the authorities and rebel gangs. Maria’s lethargic and impressionable son Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), a teenager who spends most of his time in his room, flees the family home and forms an alliance with a gang of local rebel children. As plot events unfold in dramatic fashion, Maria becomes increasingly stubborn and irrational, refusing to abandon her plantation. Violence escalates, leading to the death of a staff member and of her ex-husband (Christopher Lambert). Finally, having lost everything, Maria is left with no one to blame but her ailing father-in-law and family patriarch, Henri (Michel Subor), upon whom she enacts the ultimate act of violence and revenge: death by machete. Taking the Vial family as its focus, White Material chronicles the violent transformations of a range of characters, and in doing so, breaks from typical portrayals of postcolonial behaviours and relationships. Shohat and Stam make the point that ‘dominant cinema has spoken for the “winners” of history, in films which idealised colonial enterprise as a philanthropic “civilising mission” motivated by a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny’. [8] By contrast, Denis’ film suggests that there are no ‘winners’ and that the values and practices associated with past colonialism – of seizing, occupying and cultivating the land, and of transmitting imported values to new populations – are no longer viable 2 of 11 28/09/2016 11:00 AM Foreign Bodies, Community and Trauma in the Films of Claire Denis:... http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/09/foreign-bodies-community-... nor acceptable. Throughout the film, Maria’s focus is the cultivation of her coffee beans, an act that seems increasingly illogical as civil conflicts escalate around her. Rather than follow orders to evacuate her property, Maria puts her family in danger by refusing to abandon her crop, and later finds her property invaded. Certainly, being visible as white is no longer a ‘passport to privilege’ as was the case in colonial contexts. [9] Racial hierarchies are transformed, with those that once held power (in this case, the Vial family), now victims of their own inability to move with the times. At the conclusion of the film we are left with a sense that Maria’s life is over. Her European-headed plantation is burnt by African soldiers, her family dead and she herself is a murderer; indeed, there seems no future for Africans and Europeans to peacefully co-exist. Denis’ film does, however, end with a small sign of hope for the future of the unnamed African country: a young solider runs into the forest with Le Boxeur’s red beret, signalling future resistance and resurgence. In White, Dyer makes the point that, historically, white people have been seen as the norm: ‘not of a certain race, they’re just the human race’. [10] He calls for works in which white people are alert to their particularity, so that whiteness is ‘made strange’. [11] The Vial family (the only white characters to appear in White Material) are surrounded by African characters occupying a range of class positions, including servants, neighbours, resistance fighters and government officials. I would argue that in this film, Denis has achieved Dyer’s challenge. The casting of the pale and freckly Isabelle Huppert as Maria and the blonde-haired Christopher Lambert as her ex-husband, means that the family at the centre of the drama stands out physically, as well as on account of their wealth and power as employers. Several scenes show Maria focussing on her physical appearance: applying red lipstick or changing from work clothes into a dress. In fact, the changing of costume functions as a means to understand the timeline of the story, with frequent jumps between past and present recognisable due to the protagonist’s changed dress. More than just fulfilling the function of marking time, however, Maria’s clothing and makeup further identifies her as an outsider. After her family house is ransacked, a key scene shows her entry into town, where she discovers a female gang member wearing one of her dresses and a set of her earrings.

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