The politics of friendship and paternity: The Dardenne brothers' Rosetta

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Rosetta, the Dardenne brothers' camera designates the viewpoint of a ‘phantom’ character blurring the distinction between the objective (i.e. what the camera sees) and subjective (what the character sees). This generates a spectatorship which is neither identificatory nor distanciating, and which relates to another ‘phantom’ that preoccupies the film: the absent father. The Dardenne brothers at once imply and conceal their filmic father, whose absence from the screen is carried over in the form of the ever-tangible eye of the camera to the encounter between the viewer and Rosetta. Rosetta reads as a circuit of vibrant identity transmissions linking up and flowing between the subject, the viewer, the paternal and the auteurs: transmissions that recognize ethical relations founded in the survival and rescue of the other. By drawing on the concept of friendship as developed by Derrida in his Politics of Friendship, this article delineates the ‘becoming-friend’ that permeates the relations of all the interlinking subjectivities found within the film.