Être Chocolat

On the day of Meghan Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry in 2018, the German chocolate company Super Dickmann released and ad on their Facebook Page featuring a cartoon personification of their famous chocolate and marshmallow treat. The dessert, known as a Schokokuss (chocolate kiss), was dressed up in a white gown, wearing a crown and holding a bouquet of flowers with the caption: "What are you looking at? Wouldn't you also want to be Meghan today?" Schokokuss were known colloquially as a N***rkuss from the time when they were introduced to the German market in the late 19th century until the 1970s when protests pushed for the name change. Decapitated heads and dismembered hands are strange representations for sweet desserts. Knowing the history of chocolate and colonialism, sweets like chocolate kisses, Belgian “chocolate hands” and Spanish “Conguitos” become uncanny reminders of the brutality that was integral to the profit margin of this colonial food.

If spectatorship is consumption and consumption is labour, what is the work involved in consuming a film called Chocolat (1988)? A film that makes two mentions of the dark, rich and stimulating food, while set in a country where the raw materials for its manufacture have colonial implications? A film, whose main protagonist Protée, is the Black servant of a wealthy French family stationed in early 1950s, pre-independence Cameroon? A film whose main protagonist has dark, rich brown skin; skin that is and evenly toned and textured? Skin that is described as and to some synonymous with the product whose production was exploitative to people who look like him?

The commodification of all food crops is political. In his book Cocoa & Chocolate 1765–1914, W. G. Clarence-Smith explains that German plantations set up by Hamburg shipping firm Jantzen & Thormählen and Woermann established cacao plantations in Cameroon to produce chocolate for Europe.[1] He points out that the local Bakweri people also grew cacao on small communal plots of land at the time but were later also forced to labour on the German cocoa estates; ill-treated Cameroonians were hunted and forced to work 18-hour days in the fields, to yield crops of bananas, coffee oil palm, rubber and cacao. Rebels and those who defaulted on taxes to the colonizers were forced to work without wages on plantations. Companies such as the Dresden-based Lehmann company and Stollwerck in Cologne also produced the leading machinery for the manufacture of chocolate in the late 1900s and early 20th century. France became the largest distributor of chocolate (mostly consumed in drinkable form) in the late 19th century. The production of chocolate was a staple for European colonial business that relied on the exploitation of land and agriculture and people to turn a profit.

In an interview, Denis revealed that the title for her film refers to the old French saying, être chocolat (to be chocolate) which means to be duped, had or swindled.[2] The term is personified in the late 19tch century French clown duo „Foottit et Chocolat,” the latter of which played by a Black man.[3] In Denis’ film, Protée is chocolat, but like the Black clown who was taunted by his boss Foottit for gags, he holds the potential to turn the tables for a small victory in the end. Chocolat is rich with fatty 180-degree pans and tense climax scenes left wide like an establishing shot. It is seasoned in salty evening exteriors sequences that shine and define dark skin as more than a contrast to white. This is no small feat when one considers that the film stock was not made to represent black skin. When Kodak began to produce consumer film, it set the standard with Shirley cards, featuring a model whose white skin was discerned as the norm for a camera subject. This made it difficult to place a dark-skinned person next to a white-skinned person in front of a camera, as the film emulsion would favour everything light and render the darker parts two dimensional, and without depth. As Lorna Roth has put it, "fIlm emulsions could have been designed initially with more sensitivity to the continuum of yellow, brown, and reddish skin tones, but the design process would have had to be motivated by a recognition of the need for an extended dynamic range.“[4] According to her research, it was producers of wooden furniture, and yes, consumer chocolate, that demanded Kodak present other options to accurately photograph their products for advertising, not the Black customers complaining about the quality of their family photos. Kodak redeveloped the film to make chocolate appear desirable and delicious in pictures.

I remember studying the credits of Moonlight (2016) and counting over sixteen grips (the crew responsible for mounting cameras and lights), which I held as some clue as to how Barry Jenkins and his team created such luminous representations of Black bodies on screen. Jenkins credits Denis’ delicate visual metaphors and in particular her film Beau Travail (1999) for inspiring the pacing and editing of Moonlight.[5] I see Chocolat in Moonlight. They share a commitment to representing black skin with the same luminosity in darkness as in the bright sun, with shimmering blue casts.

How do we digest Chocolat? We must stomach the bitter undertones of colonial violence, white supremacy and patriarchy stirred into the apparatus of cinema and the framing this complex story in order to savour the patient and honest way Denis manages to make a black servant look like royalty.

[1] Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914, 86.

[2] Stone, CHOCOLAT - Bittersweet Memoir Of Colonial Africa.

[3] McMahan, Projections of Race at the Nouveau Cirque: The Clown Acts of Foottit and Chocolat.

[4] Roth, Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm, 118.

[5] Gregory, The Fearless Cinema of Claire Denis.