Dardenne Brothers Research Articles

From Local Roots to Global Screens: Shane Meadows’ Positioning in the Ecology of Contemporary British Film

This article provides a case study of the ecology of British independent film, as illustrated through the continuing career of Shane Meadows. I focus on the intersection between the practices of economic independence and creative independence, ameliorated by low-budget, local films that exploit festival showcasing and critical buzz to achieve international exhibition in a range of markets. While Meadows’ earlier films exemplify the reliance on television funding that has characterised British and continental European cinema since the 1980s, and the emerging significance of regional and Lottery-based funding in the 1990s, they also correspond to the local/international model of much low-budget European realist art cinema, best identified with the Dogme 95 films or those of the Dardenne brothers. Yet since Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002), Meadows has deviated from the established trajectory of recognised British auteurs, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, instead utilising co-production funding to reduce his budgets to ensure maintaining artistic control. Akin to post-Dogme rule-based production manifestoes such as ‘Industrial Film DK’, Meadows has developed and revisited his own rules: film what you know – focusing on a particular local community, localised identities, and restricted locations – in addition to improvisational approaches to acting. Consequently Meadows has achieved recognition as a local but global film-maker.

Book Review: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism

Book Review: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism

다르덴 형제 영화에서 '노동'의 의미와 형식미학

다르덴 형제의 영화는 사회의 변방으로 밀려난 소수자들의 문제를 다룬다. 특히 오늘날 노동 시장에서 가치를 박탈당한 인간의 삶에 큰 관심을 가진다. 이 글은 칸 영화제 수상작인 다르덴 형제 영화의 근작 <로제타>, <아들>, <더 차일드>, <로나의 침묵>, <자전거 탄 소년>을 대상으로 그러한 다르덴 형제의 사회인식을 살펴본다. 그리고 그들의 사회인식을 적확하게 담아내는 고유한 형식미학적 스타일을 분석해 보고자 한다. 먼저 다르덴 형제 영화의 내용을 보면, 절망적인 생계의 문제에 봉착한 개인이 등장한다. 그들의 고통은 정도 차를 두고 실업 상황과 긴밀하게 연관되어 있으며, 그로 인해 불가항력적인 '불안'과 '소외'의 이미지를 내보인다. 유념할 것은, 다르덴 형제의 영상은 내용을 담는 단순한 플랫폼이 아니라, 본질적인 주제의식을 드러내는 고안된 양식이라는 점이다. 단편적인 예를 들면, 인물을 담아내는 카메라의 위치와 시선, 움직임 모두가 세계 내에서 인물이 처한 상황을 성찰하게 한다. 플롯에 대한 고려도 거의 없고, 극적 장치도 없으며, 평면적이고 직선적이기까지 한 다르덴 형제의 영화가 끊임없이 긴장을 안기는 이유도 그와 같은 독자적인 형식미학의 힘이라고 할 수 있을 것이다. Dardenne brothers' films deals with minorities' issues who are shoved out to periphery of society, and especially takes interest in value-deprived human life in labor market of today. This study examines such social awareness of Dardenne brothers targeting their latest works awarded in Cannes Film Festival, <Rosetta>, <The Son>, <The Child>, <Lorna's Silence>, <The Kid with a Bike>. And analysis is attempted about Dardenne brothers' unique formal aesthetical style that exactly captures such social awareness. In Dardenne brothers' films a person shows up who faces abject matter of living. Their agony is closely connected to unemployment, and shows images of irresistible anxiety and alienation. Dardenne brothers' images are not only simple platform with contents embodied, but designed form showing essential thematic consciousness. Location and gaze, motion of camera capturing a character makes us to reflect the situation a character is facing in the world. There are almost no regard about plots, no dramatic devices, superficial and even straightforward, but Dardenne brothers' films have such independent formal aesthetic, which makes able to give endless tension.

CONSTRUCTION OF THE SACRED IN THE MOVING IMAGE

Contemporary moving image (film and video) is looking for a new form of expressing the sacred, after decades of refusing all kinds of explicit “religious” content. The notion of Sacred changed with the social evolution and today its representation is directly related to the image of reality, that allows a sincere and immediate contact with the viewer. The body’s image can be a strong mediator between the expression of the sacred and reality, because it questions the position of man in the world and its relation to others. Bill Viola and The Dardenne Brothers ‐ among others, are directors who work with a totally different cinematographic form but they have the same challenge: to reveal the potential sacred of life through light and image movement.

Education as Invitation to Speak: On the Teacher Who Does Not Speak

As a response to Le Fils, a film directed by the Dardenne brothers (2002), we explore the idea of speaking as an invitation and juxtapose it against ideas of speaking as a transactional, calculative, calibrated, activity. Speaking tends to be understood as a relatively straightforward matter: as a means of communication structured by such values as the reciprocal balancing of rights and obligations, of clear communication of information, of the gaining of insight into what is happening. Speaking, then, is a means by which we explain, prove or pass judgement on something. Understood this way, it is easily associated with ideas of empowerment or of the mediation of information: one directs or commits oneself to a (shared) orientation—for example to what Jürgen Habermas refers to as ‘communicative reason’. It presupposes a particular attitude of the subject; speaking that addresses the listener and the speaker herself in the name of an orientation or particular expertise to which access is claimed. In this article, by contrast, we would like to explore a different avenue of thought whereby speaking appears rather as an abandoning or exposing of oneself. It is less an activity than a passivity or passion, through which one becomes present in the present, which is at once also a kind of invitation. In exploring this form of speaking, we take up some ideas of Martin Buber. Our discussion relates speaking to being inspiring and being inspired, revealing in the process the way that to be inspiring is at the same time to be inspired. Speaking as invitation, we conclude, is what education is about.

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

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.

Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers

This paper explores the possibilities of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical description of the ethical life for understanding the experience of viewing a film, and this with two related goals in mind. The first is to provide a sustained Levinasian reading of the Dardenne Brothers' Lorna's Silence as an alternative to political or traditionally ethical approaches. This is necessary because the sensuous quality of Lorna's moral conversion is best understood through a set of metaphors used by Levinas to describe his ‘pre-ontological’ ethical philosophy: metaphors of the caress, the feminine and maternity. A second goal is to account for how this film's formal qualities create an encounter between viewer and film that echoes Lorna's encounters in the fictional world. To this end, the paper squares Levinasian ethics with André Bazin's realism by trimming from Bazin's work the notion of a gathered, individual subjectivity and emphasizing themes of encounter and dislocation. Lorna's Silence gives a fresh illustration of the cinema's power to encourage viewers to strive toward an altruistic notion of human relations.

Philosophy of Education as an Exercise in Thought: To Not Forget Oneself When ‘things Take Their Course’

Starting from a distinction between a critical and an ascetic tradition in philosophy and taking into account their different stances towards the present, the article proposes a practice of philosophy of education within the ascetic tradition. In this tradition, the work of philosophy is in the first place a work on the self — that is, putting oneself to ‘the test of contemporary reality’ — implying an enlightenment not of others but of oneself; however, of oneself not as subject of knowledge, but as subject of action. Putting oneself to the test is, therefore, an exercise in the context of self-education. The article indicates how this exercise can be described as an exercise of/in thought, how it has to be conceived not as a private matter but as a public gesture and as a condition for a truth-telling that is in the first place illuminating and inviting. In order to do so, the article first recalls how Hannah Arendt describes her own work and how this indicates what kind of philosophical practice is entailed in the ascetic tradition. In line with this description, a topical example (i.e. the films of the Belgian Dardenne brothers) is offered of how educational philosophical research in this tradition is carried out today. And, finally, it is clarified how this relates to a proposal for doing ‘empirical’ philosophical research and for creating laboratories. What is proposed is a meditation on the phrase ‘transformation of the educational system’, paying attention to the sense of the words, and showing what the desire for educational change can reveal. After explaining to what extent ‘educational system’ is a quasi-oxymoron, the meaning of ‘transformation’ has to be compared to those of revolution and utopia. The claim to be transforming the educational system is an attempt to adapt education to social and political situations and constraints. The case of the Langevin-Wallon project in France, which was never applied, helps when wondering what has to be adapted to what. What sort of reciprocity is there between school and society? The organisation of knowledge itself can be submitted to a transformation. Jeremy Bentham's Chrestomathia expresses such a conception through an unheeded and somehow utopian project. The desire for something new is in itself problematical, and the very fact of it being new cannot be an aim.

The Wrestler, an American Rosetta: Marginality, crisis and realism

&lt;![CDATA[By comparing movies such as Rosetta from the Dardenne brothers and The Wrestler from Darren Aronofsky, this article analyses how both films use similar unconventional diegetic and cinematographic techniques in order to explore how characters living at the margin of society are trying to reach a state of homeostasis and get out of their state of crisis.]]&gt;

Global art cinema: new theories and histories

Foreword Dudley Andrew Introduction Impurity of Art Cinema Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover 1. Delimiting the Field Beyond Europe: A Parametric Tradition? Mark Betz Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema From Stalin to Bush Sharon Hayashi Towards an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema David Andrews Unthinking Heterocentrism: Bisexual Representability in Art Cinema Maria San Filippo Interactive Art Cinema: Between Old and Media with Un Chien andalou and eXistenZ Adam Lowenstein 2. Art Cinema Image Art/Cinema and Cosmopolitanism Today Brian Price Between Auditorium and Gallery: Perception in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Films and Installations Jihoon Kim Pasolini's Exquisite Flowers: The 'Cinema of Poetry' as a John David Rhodes From Index to Figure in the European Art Film: Case of Conformist Angelo Restivo Surrealism in Art and Film: Face and Time Angela Dalle Vacche 3. Art Cinema Histories Volcano and the Barren Hill: Gabriel Figueroa and the Space of Art Cinema Patrick Keating Essay Film as a Cinema of Ideas Timothy Corrigan Cloud-Capped Star: Ritwik Ghatak on the Horizon of Global Art Cinema Manishita Dass Notes on Art Cinema and the Emergence of Sub-Saharan Film Philip Rosen Disentangling the International Festival Circuit: Genre and Iranian Cinema Azadeh Farahmand 4. Geopolitical Intersections European Art Cinema, Affect, and Post-colonialism: Herzog, Denis, and the Dardenne Brothers E. Ann Kaplan Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism Randall Halle Abderrahmane Sissako: Second and Third Cinema in the First Person Rachel Gabara Tsai Ming-liang's Haunted Movie Theater Jean Ma Traveling Theory, Shots, and Players: Jorge Sanjines, New Latin American Cinema, and the European Art Film Dennis Hanlon Critical Bibliography Notes on the Contributors

The research on the similarity between the films of Robert Bresson and ones of Dardenne Brothers -focused on the directing style shown in the 'Mouchette' and 'Rosetta'-

The research on the similarity between the films of Robert Bresson and ones of Dardenne Brothers -focused on the directing style shown in the 'Mouchette' and 'Rosetta'-

The cinema of resistance: An interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

ABSTRACTNaturalistically shot, impeccably constructed, uncompromising and emotionally searing, the Dardenne brothers' films give voice to a population often despised or ignored: illegal aliens, slumlords, corrupt officials and small-time criminals. To their characters the brothers bring a compassionate view born of the understanding that this underclass has, in part, been created by society's higher-ups. These are figures of limited material and social means who, under the most dire circumstances, must grapple with life-and-death decisions. And though the pair might deny it, their films also suggest an ingrained Christian vision through insisting on the transformative possibility of the most debased being. Le Silence de Lorna, their latest portrait, which premiered at Cannes, failed to elicit the rapturous response received by some of the earlier work, such as the 2005 Palme d'Or winner L'Enfant/The Child. Yet despite an exposition that some found lengthy, the Dardennes bring great resonance to this fable of a young Albanian immigrant caught in a terrible dilemma who struggles to redeem herself. As in 1996's La Promesse, the film focuses on the machinations forced on illegals hoping to grab a morsel of the world's wealth—in this case through fake marriages for citizenship. But this time the brothers have placed their camera in the more gentrified city of Liège, rather than their grimy industrial hometown of Seraing. I caught up with the Dardennes at the ‘Cannes Film Festival’ in May 2009, where Le Silence de Lorna won the award for best screenplay, and had the following conversation with them about the totality of their film work.

The cinema of resistance: an interview with Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

ABSTRACTNaturalistically shot, impeccably constructed, uncompromising and emotionally searing, the Dardenne brothers' films give voice to a population often despised or ignored: illegal aliens, slumlords, corrupt officials and small-time criminals. To their characters the brothers bring a compassionate view born of the understanding that this underclass has, in part, been created by society's higher-ups. These are figures of limited material and social means who, under the most dire circumstances, must grapple with life-and-death decisions. And though the pair might deny it, their films also suggest an ingrained Christian vision through insisting on the transformative possibility of the most debased being. Le Silence de Lorna, their latest portrait, which premiered at Cannes, failed to elicit the rapturous response received by some of the earlier work, such as the 2005 Palme d'Or winner L'Enfant/The Child. Yet despite an exposition that some found lengthy, the Dardennes bring great resonance to this fable...

Film International 41: Baghdad Bad and Belgian brothers

Murray Pomerance examines depictions of Arabs in Hollywood movies, from Valentino to Syriana, and figures out what they say about us rather than them. Bert Cardullo has talked to the Belgian Dardenne brothers about their rare brand of realist cinema and their thirty years of filmmaking. Gary McMahon looks at how New York filmmakers, like Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman, turned to magical realism to describe their city and make sense of a surreal reality in the aftermath of 9/11. And Angela Tumini traces the issues of national identity and cultural fusion in contemporary Europe in the films of Julio Medem, a Basque director living in Madrid, and Ferzan Ozpetek, Turkish born but living in Rome. All this, plus a packed review section, in our next issue.

The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film since 1995

This book brings together two important facets of French studies, namely cinema and politics. As Martin O'Shaughnessy rightly points out, the new wave of political films under discussion is thematically and formally different from earlier trends. This is why, before concentrating on recent changes, he sets the scene in an enlightening contextual chapter on political cinema in France complemented by useful illustrations from post-1968 films such as Godard and Gorin's Tout va bien (1972) and Karmitz's Coup pour coup (1971). The post-1995 period is presented as the rebirth of ‘committed cinema’ and ‘return to the real’ (p. 2), expressions which are possibly problematic translations for cinéma engagé and le réel. Here are central concepts in French culture, albeit difficult to capture in English. Similarly, distinctions tend to remain rather implicit when using ‘political’, ‘militant’, ‘engaged’ and ‘committed’ to qualify the films and directors. O'Shaughnessy's main argument is that recent films engagés present fragmented stories of marginalized individuals and symbolic geographical settings, rather than the more universal narratives of solidarity traditionally associated with the genre. He is particularly concerned with filmic responses to aggressive, neo-liberal capitalism, and shows effectively that the dramaturgy of class has been shattered due to the ‘collapse of totalizing left-wing narratives’ and ‘the weakening of the nation's symbolic protection’ (p. 3). His analysis is aptly articulated around influential French theoretical frameworks, including the work of Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière. It is also usefully informed by the critical debates of Cahiers du cinéma and Positif. The book is particularly engaging in its exploration of the strategies mobilized to replace the politics of the past and open up possible future channels. The films under scrutiny restore an oppositional political voice in cinema, and provide visibility to social suffering and struggle. The argument develops around an ‘aesthetic of the fragment’ (p. 99), and highlights the functions fulfilled by motifs borrowed from banlieue film and melodrama. The main conclusion calls for a constructive interpretation of the recent evolution of French political cinema, emphasizing how it restores eloquence and visibility to the socio-political struggle, including a capacity to configure the real, a sense of value, ethical agency and resistance to spatial dislocation (pp. 181–182). O'Shaughnessy has selected a wide range of relevant films to illustrate his carefully constructed progressive argument. The analyses involve established directors such as Bertrand Tavernier and Robert Guédiguian as well as newcomers of the 1990s sometimes labelled the ‘Young French Cinema’, including Matthieu Kassovitz, Laurent Cantet, Bruno Dumont, Erick Zonca, Dominique Cabrera and Laetitia Masson. Significant space is rightly devoted to the Belgian Dardenne brothers who, like most of the other names mentioned, have received insufficient critical attention in English. Some of the films, which are unfortunately unavailable outside France, are suitably introduced prior to discussion, and the book may even help to provide wider access to them. It will certainly appeal to anyone interested in a cinema that engages with the real world.

Flemish Cinema and Film Culture through South African Eyes

THE HERITAGE OF FILM: PERSPECTIVE ON FLEMISH CINEMA AND FILM CULTURE THROUGH SOUTH AFRICAN EYES I assisted the Locarno Film festival in 2005 with a retrospective of short films by young South African directors. There I met a very talented, young Flemish director, whose film was by far the best in the one section.(1) It moved me immensely with its honest portrait of alienation and racial discrimination. We had a long discussion on film history, aesthetics and film cultures. We also talked about the history of film in Belgium and it was noted that while the French speaking side of Belgian cinema had recently received international acclaim (for example, the work by the Dardenne Brothers), Flemish cinema was struggling. In fact, the young filmmaker made the statement that there was little to be excited about in the history of Flemish cinema. He felt especially that the films about...

Corps-Caméra : The Evocation of Touch in the Dardennes' La Promesse (1996)

Without the universalizing political ideologies of the European Left, the Dardenne brothers focus their cinema on creating a sense of touch between audience and the film. Their "haptic" cinema disrupts viewers' subjectivities and gives them a sensuous experience of other worlds, leading to an ever-shifting ethical bricolage.

‘New(er) stories’: Narration and de-figuration in Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967)

Robert Bresson's continued importance to film-makers and theorists has hinged on a conflict, felt acutely in Mouchette (1967), between narrative representation (a novel adapted from the Catholic novelist and polemicist Georges Bernanos) and a form that privileges fragmentation and ellipsis. Within Gilles Deleuze's theoretical framework, this opposition can be understood as an avoidance of conventional cultural representations of female adolescence in favour of fluid images that carry the difference of pure bodies directly to the viewer's senses. However, borrowing from Jacques Ranciere's concept of de-figuration, one can question whether the fluid identity of the film's protagonist achieves total liberation from coercive narrative and social representations. In Mouchette, Bresson does not simply thwart our desire to know through coherent stories; instead his intentionally contradictory presentation of sound, actors and space are constituted by a countering of a culturally saturated narrative, a struggle ending in stalemate. A rereading of Mouchette and a consideration of its legacy in other films, such as Catherine Breillat's 36 Fillette (1988) and the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta (1999), highlight both the power and the limits of Bresson's de-figuration of his French Catholic tradition.

The Amateur Actors of Cannes 1999: A Shock to the (Star) System

At the Cannes film festival in 1999 the perennial tension within French film between popular cinema and auteur cinema came to a head with the award of the Palme d’Or to the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta. Moreover, three amateurs were given Best Actor awards: Émilie Dequenne for Rosetta, plus Emmanuel Schotté and Séverine Caneele for L’Humanité. This article analyses the performances of the amateur actors in the above films, and evaluates to what extent they offer a challenge to conventional modes of representation, and in particular to the idealised embodiments of masculinity and femininity traditionally presented by film stars. The notion of the amateur as Bressonian model will also be addressed, as will the possibility of amateur actors challenging the supremacy of the auteur and moving into the realm of popular stardom.