WHITE MATERIAL by Claire Denis

Last weekend I went to the Harvard film archive to see Claire Denis’s White Material. Claire is a French filmmaker, an auteur, and traveled to Cambridge for the screening.  I took the bus over to the film archive to arrive an hour before the showing time and people were already milling about the lobby waiting for tickets to go on sale. The theatre soon filled up to it’s maximum capacity and Denis even came into the theatre to let us who were able to get a seat know that there was a long line outside and joked that no one was allowed to leave the theatre until the film was over.

Denis was born in Paris in 1948 but spent some of her childhood living in Cameroon and was exposed to a lot of conflict there. White Material reflected her interest and further investigation into the life of a French family in Africa during a dangerous and corrupt time with the civil war going on around them. The protagonist is played by French actress Isabelle Huppert whose character is a coffee plantation owner who is insistent on staying in Africa despite urges by the French government, her husband and son, local people, and almost everyone she meets to flee the country and return to France where she will be safe from the rebel soldiers who are rampaging the country in a violent manner.

Prior to the film’s start the person sitting to my left forewarned me that Denis’s films tend to get slow and even suggested that I might grab a coffee if I was feeling tired. The film’s pace is one aspect that I enjoyed the most about it. The way which time unraveled in the film allowed me to become enthralled in the story and better acquainted with the characters, particularly Huppert. I really liked watching small experiences unfold in a more “real-time” fashion. I’m so used to being over stimulated with action packed sequences in most feature length films and the focus on the small details and facets which make up both the characters dynamic being and contributed to a rich plot. This technique allowed me to enter a somewhat meditative state and more attentive to how things were unfolding.

The film was shot beautifully, long shots and I like the use of close ups with the main actress.

Denis was around for a question and answer session after the film and the most valuable thing I took away from it regarding the filmmaking experience was this: the filmmaker spoke about how when shooting a film (wherever) you have to be positive and able to deal with adversity as it presents itself. In the case of White Material, all of the lighting equipment was held up in customs for three weeks during the initial shooting! Because of this, Claire was forced to rework her script, leave some things out, rearrange her shooting plans to only shoot in natural light and the outdoor shots until her equipment arrived. She explained how important it is to remain calm and collected and positive for the sake of the rest of the cast when things like this happen. She said that the “budget is the itinerary for the script”, the audience laughed and she confirmed “this is not a joke, it’s real” and that for this one must be willing to rework the structure of their film when constraints present themselves.