The Dardenne Brothers’ Cinematic Parables: Integrating Theology, Philosophy, and Film

This is a book review of Joel Mayward, The Dardenne Brothers’ Cinematic Parables: Integrating Theology, Philosophy, and Film (Routledge, 2023)

Empathic projection in the films of the Dardenne brothers

The analysis of cinematic style in the films of the Dardenne brothers has primarily focused on the combination of realism and ethics. This paper instead focuses on the combination of realist and modernist styles in certain aspects of the Dardennes’ films. The emphasis is on two particular stylistic traits: first, the use of a medium distance two-shot, and second, the use of a back-and-forth handheld camera movement used typically in conversation scenes. These techniques are taken up in relation to what philosopher Stanley Cavell has called ‘empathic projection’, a term recently used by art historian Michael Fried in relation to art and cinema. It is the combination of realist and modernist styles that gives rise to the spectator's projection of empathic feeling onto or into characters in the films of the Dardenne brothers

Eloquent fragments: French fiction film and globalization

French (and Franco-Belgian) cinema has witnessed a return to the real since the middle of the 1990s and should thus successfully have pinned down the impact of the globalizing economy on the sociopolitical sphere. Yet neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the frame of conventional fictions. Condemned to be a cinema of fragments by the shattering of the old leftist imaginary, has French cinema merely tracked globalization's local consequences, always letting systemic causes escape its grasp? Or has it identified successful strategies with which to restore eloquence to social struggle and suffering that otherwise seemed condemned to silence? Engaging with important films by the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Bertrand Tavernier, Manuel Poirier, Matthieu Kassovitz and others, this paper argues the latter. French film, it suggests, has found ways to make the fragments speak to the totality, to short-circuit neoliberal triumphalism and to interpellate a nation that no longer plays its erstwhile integrational role. While none of these strategies can provide totalizing systemic critique, they do show that cinema is playing an active role in the rebuilding of a radical oppositional imaginary

Unplugged - Two days, one night, or the objective violence of capitalism

International audienceViolence is omnipresent in "Two Days, One Night" the latest film by the Dardenne brothers. But does the violence lie with the characters, willing to sacrifice one of their already vulnerable colleagues? Or does it lie with the system, which forces them to make an impossible choice where, ultimately, everyone has something to lose? Using the works of philosopher Slavoj Žižek as our framework, we shall attempt to ponder this question of violence and how it might be overcome

The ‘Transnational Regional’ in Francophone Belgian Cinema

This thesis explores the films produced in the francophone Belgian region of Wallonia as a case study for the configuration of what will be termed a ‘transnational regional’ cinema. The first section of this dynamic is considered in relation to film and cultural policy, which problematizes the possible formation of a clearly delineated regional or ‘national’ cinema. This presupposes a reconfiguring of the transnational along the lines of the regional and the linguistic communities of Belgium, which, in essence, pertains to how production, distribution and exhibition mechanisms function within the devolved region of Wallonia. This section therefore focuses on film policy as well as a macro- and micro- economic analysis of the industry in order to consider the perceived imbalance between Belgian and French cinema. In the second half, the thesis develops a textual analysis of a series of case study films to consider how cultural film policy and francophone Belgian identity is imagined and then imaged on screen. The interplay between the transnational and the regional is then nuanced by the approaches to the ‘transnational regional’ aesthetic. This aesthetic includes the visualization of the rural and urban Walloon landscape in Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008) and Ultranova (Lanners, 2006) and the ‘marked’ regional landscape in Cages (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2006). The shift in location across the conterminous border with France due to the logic of film funding engenders the approach to the ‘marked’ regional space in Masset-Depasse’s film. The final chapter tracks this aesthetic through to the works of the Dardenne brothers and in particular Le gamin au vélo (Dardenne brothers, 2011) in order to approach the construction of a peripheral spatial formation through corporeal movements. This therefore necessitates a consideration of how the Dardenne brothers’ film chimes with waves of European filmmaking, thereby revealing a regional space that is conceptualized as de-centred.University of Exeter Studentshi

Fetish, Sacrifice and Tragic Freedom in the Dardenne Brothers\u27 La Promesse

Fetish, Sacrifice and Tragic Freedom and in the Dardenne Brothers’ La Promesse (Abstract) The purpose of this article is to begin drawing attention to the strong likelihood that Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) contributed important ideas to the creation of La Promesse (1996) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. In the current article, we take note of just two of its most important aspects: animism, and the childlike recurrence of totemism. In La Promesse, these concepts are elaborated in relationship to a small African statue present in the home of the West African illegal immigrants, Assita and Hamidou. The sculpture – which Freud would call a fetish – is a locus of mysterious spiritual forces (Freud’s “animism”), which, together with Assita, contribute to bringing Igor to a greater personal and spiritual maturity. Igor eventually rejects his father’s world (which casually includes the Christian God, whenever it suits the father’s needs), and freely accepts affiliation with his new pseudo-mother Assita and the blend of African spirituality which is part and parcel of her world. The film’s narrative is given considerable depth due to the inclusion of complex echoes of the sacrifice of Abraham from Biblical culture, and the oedipal structures of tragic self-discovery from Ancient Greece. The directors skillfully empower the West African statue as a catalyst activating all these layers of meaning

Towards a ‘transnational regional’ cinema: the francophone Belgian case study

This article proposes the concept of the ‘transnational regional’ as a means of better understanding the transnational-national-regional basis of contemporary francophone Belgian cinema. It is an equally apposite way of approaching questions of national and transnational cinema, and the notion of a cinema of small nations. Although the ‘national’ approach remains salient, it is not wholly sufficient for thinking about the industrial predicate of contemporary Belgian cinema, particularly since the formation of Wallimage in 2001. This idea takes into account the global and the local, since it is within this tension that the ‘transnational regional’ begins to emerge, particularly in the contexts of film production, distribution and exhibition

Rosetta Stone: A Consideration of the Dardenne Brothers\u27 Rosetta

The Dardenne brothers\u27 Rosetta has Christian overtones despite its unrelieved bleakness of tone. In fact, the titular heroine, a teenaged Belgian girl living in dire, subproletarian poverty, has much in common with Robert Bresson\u27s protagonists Mouchette and Balthasar. Both Mouchette (1966) and Au hasard Balthasar (1966) are linked with Rosetta in their examination of the casual, gratuitous inhumanity to which the meek of this earth are subjected, and both films partake of a religious tradition, or spiritual style, dominated by French Catholics like Bresson, Cavalier, Pialat, and Doillon. Those who have argued that the Dardennes\u27 film is merely a documentary-like chronicle of a depressing case choose to ignore this work\u27s religious element, in addition to the fact that Rosetta, unlike Mouchette or Balthasar, is alive and in the good company of a genuine human spirit at the end