ipl-logo

Chocolat Analysis

1499 Words6 Pages

Claire Denis’ Chocolat in juxtaposition to Frantz Fanon’s concept of colonial violence. 1. Introduction Analyses of the film ‘Chocolat’ by Claire Denis in contrast to Frantz Fanon’s writing ‘The Fact of Blackness.’ The title of the movie Chocolat was derived from a colloquial speech meaning ‘to be had, to be cheated,’ in connotation with ‘to be black and to be cheated’ (cited in Sandars 2001). Chocolat is a movie of endless delicacies, it is about the boundaries set by the racist society. In the film two adults (Aimee and Protee) are mutually attracted to each other but can’t be together because of their skin colour differences (Ebert). Chocolat relays heavily on visuals to emphasise the conflict between France’s family and the servants. …show more content…

Who was seen as part of the family but treated as a subject. Chocolat is a film directed by Claire Denis in 1988 about a French family that lived in colonial era in Cameroon. In the fifth chapter of his book Fanon wrote an essay entitled “The Fact of Blackness” which was in a form of a cry of a black man. The writing was released at a time when decolonisation and self-determination were intensifying and taking the centre stage. Macey (2000). The colonial violence in Fanon’s book and the scenes in chocolat are comparable. Figure 1 Protee in the outdoor shower. Claire Denis (film director and writer), chocolat, 1988 (screen shot by Gift) (Denis 1988). 2. …show more content…

What is depicted in the picture is the outside extreme of the colonial violence which is far less compared to the internal damage instigated by the colonial other. Morgan agrees that the colour line separating colonizer and colonized is internal, “exists within each of these two cultural positions as well as between them,” that “the psycho-social relationship between colonizer and colonized is . . . complex and multi-layered . . .” (cited in Morgan 145-146). The colonisers spent years creating bleach chemicals for “denegrification” so that they can save a black man from the curse of being black as the black skin is unclean. Fanon finds himself suffering from schizophrenia and many disorders as a result of the white man’s harsh treatment. When all he wanted was to be himself. To a white man from France, Fanon was a “Martinican, a native of “our” old colonies” (Fanon, 1986, p.113), which was a perception which deprived the black man of self-pride or confidence in himself. Figure 3Protee helps Aimee fasten her revealing evening gown. Claire Denis (film director and writer), Chocolat, 1988 (screen shot by Gift) (Denis

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of King Leopold's Ghost

    969 Words  | 4 Pages

    Summary of the text: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is a historical fiction published in 1998 (Hochschild, 1998). It comprises a myriad of evidence to testify the Belgian King Leopold II’s atrocities in Congo between 1885 and 1908 for the sake of capturing the attention of various readers towards the Belgian imperialist delinquencies through a detailed narration of a number of main characters’, including George Washington Williams and William Henry Sheppard, experiences in Belgian Congo (Hochschild, 1998). In this excerpt, it illustrates William’s peaceful exploration in Congo as the first American-Black missionary. During his journey, not only did he explore the Congolese culture,

    Read More

  • Gerald Stanley's Storying Violence, Questions And Answers

    1633 Words  | 7 Pages

    1. During the trial, Gerald Stanley’s lawyer claimed that the trial was not “a referendum on race”. In what ways does Storying Violence provide a response to this assertion? Storying Violence: Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial provides an opposing response to the claim of Stanley’s lawyer, Scott Spencer, that the trial was not a “referendum on race”.

    Read More

  • Creating African Americans Chapter 1 Summary

    485 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Chapter 1 and 2 of “Creating Black Americans,” author Nell Irvin Painter addresses an imperative issue in which African history and the lives of Africans are often dismissed (2) and continue to be perceived in a negative light (1). This book gives the author the chance to revive the history of Africa, being this a sacred place to provide readers with a “history of their own.” (Painter 4) The issue that Africans were depicted in a negative light impacted various artworks and educational settings in the 19th and early 20th century. For instance, in educational settings, many students were exposed to the Eurocentric Western learning which its depiction of Africa were not only biased, but racist as well.

    Read More

  • The Three Faces Of Sans Souci Analysis

    389 Words  | 2 Pages

    Critique Number Two Chapter two, titled The Three Faces of Sans Souci, gives an example of the silencing of a story in Haitian history. Trouillot uncovers, for the reader, the truth behind a name: Sans Souci. In this case, the truth was a person, previously obscured from the story surrounding the castle in Milot, named Sans Souci, an important component of the history of Haiti. The truth had been blurred by a biased viewpoint, which mistakenly connected the name Sans Souci to a German palace, rather than to Sans Souci, the man, who was killed by Henry Christophe, a hero to many in Haiti, due to his victories in the Haitian Revolution, and the constructor, owner, and namer of the Haitian palace of Sans Souci. How does this compare to the story

    Read More

  • Exploitation In Michelle Cliff's Down The Shore

    1526 Words  | 7 Pages

    Michelle Cliff’s short story Down the Shore conspicuously deals with a particularly personal and specific, deeply psychological experience, in order to ultimately sub-textually create a metaphor regarding a wider issue of highly social nature. More specifically, the development of the inter-dependent themes of trauma, exploitation, as well as female vulnerability, which all in the case in question pertain to one single character, also latently extend over to the wider social issue of colonialism and its entailing negative repercussions, in this case as it applies to the Caribbean and the British Empire. The story’s explicit personal factor is developed through the literary techniques of repetition, symbolism, metaphor, as well as slightly warped albeit telling references to a distinct emotional state, while its implicit social factor is suggested via the techniques of allusion, so as to ultimately create a generally greater, undergirding metaphor.

    Read More

  • Phillis Wheatley Thesis

    2649 Words  | 11 Pages

    This gives the reader a first hand look into what it was like to be an African American during the Revolutionary era. These people were viewed as a lesser race only because of the color of their skin, or as Wheatley states, the speaker’s “diabolic

    Read More

  • A Habit Of Waste By Nalo Hopkinson Summary

    530 Words  | 3 Pages

    The effects of colonialism are intergenerational, this story exposes the raw feelings of victims of colonization and the internalization of racist ideologies that often occurs as a result of Caribbean history being wrongly painted. Conforming to the standards of society is often easier than bearing the challenges associated with being an outlier; however, conformity leads to resentment and hatred. Cynthia chooses to conform to society's standards of white supremacy, which results in her discarding her own body for the figure of a white woman. Unfortunately, Cynthia begins to form a deep hatred for herself and her culture which her parents and strangers are subjected to.

    Read More

  • A Raisin In The Sun Film Analysis

    1601 Words  | 7 Pages

    “A Raisin in the Sun,” written by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, was the first play ever produced on Broadway by an African-American woman and was considered ground-breaking for it’s time. Titled after Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” sometimes known as “A Dream Deferred,” the play and the subsequent film adaptations are honest examinations of race, family, poverty, discrimination, oppression and even abortion in urban Chicago after WWII. The original play was met with critical praise, including a review by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times where he wrote, “For A Raisin in the Sun is a play about human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be their fate. Not having any axe to grind, Miss Hansberry has a wide range of topics to write about-some of them hilarious, some of them painful in the extreme.” The original screen adaptation released in 1961 was highly acclaimed in its own right, and was chosen in 2005 for preservation in the United States of America National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural and historical significance.

    Read More

  • Similarities Between Chocolat And Like Water For Chocolate

    1343 Words  | 6 Pages

    Religioso, Ariana Nicole A. 1CheD A Savoured Disparity and Similarity: Like Water for Chocolate vs. Chocolat The realms of the novel, Like Water for Chocolate and the movie, Chocolat are hardly seen in accord with one another. Having different approach of eras, in different styles, and in different cultures, these two appear, at first glance, to have little in common. The approach of Chocolat’s movie realism seems very incompatible with Like Water for Chocolate’s surrealistic imagery, and yet, if we look closely and way deeper, we can find common threads woven between the two works.

    Read More

  • Jamaica Kincaid's Blackness Essay

    479 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the short story “Blackness” by Jamaica Kincaid, the narrator’s consciousness develops through a process of realization that she does not have to choose between the culture imposed on her and her authentic heritage. First, the narrator explains the metaphor “blackness” for the colonization her country that fills her own being and eventually becomes one with it. Unaware of her own nature, in isolation she is “all purpose and industry… as if [she] were the single survivor of a species” (472). Describing the annihilation of her culture, the narrator shows how “blackness” replaced her own culture with the ideology of the colonizers.

    Read More

  • The Dressmaker Analysis

    911 Words  | 4 Pages

    “The Dressmaker” has many similar elements and features to spaghetti westerns. How has the director used the style to engage a modern audience? The Dressmaker, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, is loved by many but disliked by an equal number for its quirky and unusual plot, acting and setting. It is set in the 1950’s and closely follows the style of spaghetti westerns which gained popularity in the same period of time.

    Read More

  • Racism Exposed In Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man

    769 Words  | 4 Pages

    This distance effectively eradicates all forms of racism that are not as visible or highly publicized in today’s media as violence, such as acts of prejudice and discrimination. (Although homicide is, admittedly, far more perversely exciting material than housing discrimination.) In turn, this omission absolves both parties when they come to an armistice when, in reality, the majority of racism today manifests in such subversive methods. However imprecise in its criticism, “the Other Foot” remains accurate in its main tenets. Bradbury does not do justice to the exact depth and range of racism that is so thoroughly

    Read More

  • Les Miserables Historical Analysis

    3327 Words  | 14 Pages

    This essay will examine the historical accuracy of the film Les Miserables in terms of the social, economic and political conditions in French society post French Revolution. The film Les Miserables depicts an extremely interesting time in French history (from about 1815-1832.) Even though the story line does not depict every detail and event that occurred during the time period as well as the fact that some aspects are dramatized for entertainment purposes, the film effectively spans thirty years of economic, political and social aspects of French Society. However it also manages to bring in references to the past, the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the impact it had on the society portrayed in the film.

    Read More

  • Racism And Violence In Richard Wright's Black Boy

    671 Words  | 3 Pages

    The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).

    Read More

  • Breathless Movie Analysis

    1529 Words  | 7 Pages

    Breathless, originally titled ‘À bout de souffle’, made in 1960 is a movie about a small-time thief who steals a car and murders a policeman. The story is about authorities chasing him while he reunites with an American journalist and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy. Jean-Luc Godard, the director of the movie often quotes, ‘To make a film, all you need is a girl and a gun.’, which is probably the inspiration behind this movie. Breathless was one of the movies that kicked off the French New Wave. Like several of his French New Wave members, Jean-Luc Godard started as a film critic, and wrote for the magazine ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ in the 1950s, when he was in his early 20s.

    Read More

More about Chocolat Analysis

Open Document