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

Neorealism, History, and The Children’s Film: Vittorio de Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us reconsidered

Vittorio De Sica used a child protagonist for the first time, not in his neorealist masterpiece Shoeshine (1946), but in his first truly serious film, The Children Are Watching Us (1943), which examines the impact on a young boy’s life of his mother’s extramarital affair with a family friend. The Children Are Watching Us proved to be a key work, thematically as well as stylistically, in De Sica’s directing career. In its thematic attempt to reveal the underside of Italy’s moral life, this film was indicative of a rising new vision in Italian cinema. And in exhibiting semi-documentary qualities by being shot partially on location, as well as by using nonprofessional actors in some roles, The Children Are Watching Us was a precursor of the neorealism that would issue forth after the liberation of occupied Rome

Cinema and Theology: The Case of Heaven Over the Marshes

André Bazins impact, as theorist and critic, is widely considered to be greater than that of any single director, actor, or producer, despite his early death (at only 40) of leukemia in 1958. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. In 1951 Bazin co-founded and became editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, the single most influential critical periodical in the history of the cinema. Bazin can also be considered the principal instigator of the equally influential auteur theory: the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator of its unique cinematic style. In this review-essay, Bazin reveals that he was also the most religious of film critics and theorists. He is fundamentally holistic in his Catholicism, however, not remotely doctrinal. Spiritual sensitivity and its enablement through cinema are central to Bazins view of film as obligated to God, to honor Gods universe by rendering its reality and, by means of its reality, its mystery. Thus Bazin believes that Augusto Geninas’ Heaven over the Marshes (1949) is a good Catholic film Precisely because it rejects religious ornament and the supernatural element of traditional hagiographies, in favor of creating a phenomenology of sainthood. Genina, that is, looks at sainthood from the outside, as the ambiguous yet tangible manifestation of a spiritual reality that is absolutely impossible to prove. Hence Heaven over the Marshes confers sainthood on the murdered Maria Goretti not a priori, like most cinematic hagiographies, but only after the fact

"The fruits of independence": Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, ‘everybody-has-his-reasons’ humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work

Neorealism, History, and The Children’s Film: Vittorio de Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us reconsidered

Vittorio De Sica used a child protagonist for the first time, not in his neorealist masterpiece Shoeshine (1946), but in his first truly serious film, The Children Are Watching Us (1943), which examines the impact on a young boy’s life of his mother’s extramarital affair with a family friend. The Children Are Watching Us proved to be a key work, thematically as well as stylistically, in De Sica’s directing career. In its thematic attempt to reveal the underside of Italy’s moral life, this film was indicative of a rising new vision in Italian cinema. And in exhibiting semi-documentary qualities by being shot partially on location, as well as by using nonprofessional actors in some roles, The Children Are Watching Us was a precursor of the neorealism that would issue forth after the liberation of occupied Rome