Some Initial Notes on White Material

Super-coherence 2: Denis slides White Material's chronology around, but, as in The Intruder, it's to clarify, not to artfully obscure. Time shifts as aspects / moments are pulled out, like someone pulling on a thread in order to untangle a knot (in this case, the brutal ending).

If it weren't for the folding of time -- if the narrative were more conventionally "straightforward," which isn't to say it would be straightforward at all, merely conventional -- the final act of violence would seem like one of those contrived accusatory enigmas Haneke specializes in.

White Material is more or less Denis doing Haneke: a privileged family-microcosm is destroyed by the bourgeois values (the ethical importance of preserving what one has earned) it holds on to.

But Denis is slier and more fluid, so instead of crescendoing to an event (as Haneke, ever the showman, always does), she starts with the central event and takes it apart piece by piece, object by object (and the objects do pile on, including a gold-plated lighter, a red currency bag, a purple robe, two motorcycles, a bottle of Fanta, a revolver and the ultimate symbol of Western decadence: Nicolas Duvauchelle's full-sleeve, full-color tattoo and the money, time and idleness it hints at).

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"Coffee isn't worth dying for," or something along those lines is what Maurice the foreman says to Huppert before he speeds off on his motorcycle for safety.

Isabelle Huppert's character repeats again and again that the coffee plantation she refuses to leave is all she has left, and that abandoning it would represent the ultimate act of cowardice; Denis, in turn, shows, again and again, that the people who really have next to nothing (and don't think that it's a badge of honor) have already run away. Huppert is as entrenched in a fantasy as Duvauchelle and his child soldiers and tattoos.

Haneke and Visconti

These are stills from Michael Haneke's 1984 TV movie Wer war Edgar Allen?, which is apparently set in the same city as Visconti's White Nights (which, like any Dostoevsky film, is the director's and not the author's; every good filmmaker finds their own Dostoevsky). Same taughtly-bent bridges, same rain, same textured walls, same dirty old river, same dirty old beds. I know that Haneke shot at least part of Edgar Allan in Venice, but it still looks like Cinecitta.

Haneke and Visconti have a lot more in common than you'd think, not least of which is the idea of the director as a privileged observer, and of the camera as a sort of education or background that allows its operators to understand the events unfolding better than the people in front of the lens (characters or actors) ever could. There's also this underlying assumption that an image imprinted on celluloid or video is inherently false and that, through the manipulation of this falseness, a director can create images that, though still in no way true, can lead the audience to understand some sort of truth. Not quite "the lie that tells the truth," as Cocteau once called himself, but "the falsehood that may lead somewhere."