Postcolony's Colonial Registers in Claire Denis's Chocolat and White Material

Abstract

Much has been written that I hope not to reiterate in the conversation that follows with Ms. Claire Denis, auteur filmmaker of extraordinary insight on all manner of lived experience of the postcolonial subject [fig. 1]. Less considered by audiences and critics alike is the correspondence between Chocolat (1988) and White Material (2009). Such correspondence occurs to me, not because they share a relational temporality of place and circumstance, or even the autobiographical, which Denis has denied. Instead, this correspondence is because the films foreground a relationship and shared encounter in the intersection, specificities, and determinations between two historical formations, and the central characters are emblematic of archetypes, however nuanced and differentiated, by that encounter.