Special Event: White Material

For my special event assignment, I attended a screening of the film White Material, directed by Claire Denis, which opened in New York last week (and opens in LA 11/26). The film takes place in an unidentified African country and is centered around the terror and devastation remaining after post-colonialism through the eyes of a white woman, Maria, and her family, who refuse to vacate their coffee plantation when they learn that civil war has broken out and that violent rebels are fast approaching.

As the both the rebels and the narrative progress, the film exposes the ideology behind the various tensions between the countries inhabitants. On many levels, the film attempts to humanize all inhabitants of the space, regardless of their actions. It does so by referring to the question of home—by acknowledging and at times, validating, each group’s sense of entitlement to this country. On one hand, the film communicates Maria’s right to her home, yet, it challenges this by depicting other groups’ sentiments towards the white population and additionally, their own hardships that they believe have earned them the right to control their ‘home’. While Maria’s stubborn refusal to part from her home is infuriating and unjustified, as it puts her family in grave danger, a series of flashbacks communicates her understandable ties, and furthermore, right, to her land and her home. However, during one scene, an African man tells Maria that the country “doesn’t like” her or her son, despite the fact that he is a native and born in Africa. Although Maria distinguishes herself and family from the “dirty whites”, it is clear that the sentiments and history associated with this skin color overshadow the individual. While the film refuses to point a finger by continuously communicating each group’s reasoning, these scenes do little to humanize neither any individual nor the terror of the event. For example, one scene depicts a group of rebel children sleeping in sea of stuffed animals, reminding the audience that these are just children and furthermore, they innocently feel just as entitled to their home. However, their actions can not be ignored nor validated; rather, this scene is one of many that expresses that each individual is a human and should be treated as such--which is something the characters cannot comprehend.

Overall, the film brought up questions that have lingered throughout many of our lectures this semester. After large-scale political change and centuries of power struggles, what is national identity? What is a boundary and who has the right to extricate an individual, a culture, or an ethnicity from a territory? Does a territory truly belong to anyone? And if so, who has the right to call their country ‘home’? While the film does not answer any of these, it proposes the question as one of duality. Given the fictional narrative and unidentified country, the film serves to remind us that these are questions that can exist anywhere at anytime--they should not be read as specific to an event or territory—they already and will always exist within each and everyone’s ‘home’.