Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Preface and Acknowledgments

preface and acknowledgments I would like to make a film that is also a handshake. —Luc Dardenne, Au dos de nos images, 10 “A film that is also a handshake”: This transsensorial metaphor—mixing vision, touch, affect, and ethics—is worth unpacking as one approaches the cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. La promesse (1996), the film that brought the Belgian-born brothers to worldwide recognition, gives an idea of what a cinematic handshake might resemble. As the credits roll, we do not get the music and creative graphics that usually transition us into a world of fiction. Instead there are simple red credits over a black screen, telling us the mundane funding sources of the film, including the Belgian lottery, and a “foundation for social action.” There is no mention of actors, only the directors’ quick signature and the title. We are bathed in everyday sounds, recorded directly: the low hum and clicking of a gas pump, the slam of a car door, simple sounds that transition the viewer not into a fictional world, but into the everyday world that awaits us every time we step outside. The Dardennes’ films are not so much understood on a symbolic level, through characters, decors, and lighting, as felt on a tactile or emotional level. La promesse follows the struggles of Assita, an undocumented Burkinabe immigrant in Belgium. In several scenes she carries a boxy shopping bag with thick vertical stripes of red, white, and blue. It is made of cheap, fibrous nylon, can be bought at discount stores, and is meant to be disposable. Like Assita, who carries everything she owns in it, the bag is resilient. But its function is not metaphorical. This concentration on detail and the long sequence shots throughout the film give the bag x | preface and acknowledgments a tactile quality, at least in my personal experience of the film, for I can feel its distinct fibrous texture between my fingers. It remains in my mind long after viewing as well, orienting my attention to other such bags that I have seen, often carried by other immigrants like Assita, in the urban markets of France. This bag is furthermore but one small example of the tendency to evoke touch in this film; La promesse and other Dardenne works are filled with weights, shapes, textures, and smells that evoke our senses and that can lead us to draw complex, and sometimes highly individualized, associations.1 There is a strong transcendent element to viewing these objects and bodies, which we do not passively observe from the comfort of our seats through a frame that separates us from the film’s world. It is tempting to simply explore the richness of all these textures. But the film’s style is not aiming at a sensuous experience situated entirely outside the realm of concepts and reasoned thinking. The handshake metaphor is not only tactile—it also reveals a generous appeal to the viewers’ sense of solidarity with others. La promesse doesn’t separate us from daily life in the way many adventure or war films do, but actually leaves us with a heightened awareness of our place within a broader context . The film gives us a diachronous experience: We become sensitized to the dramatic situations, but through various stylistic means—including a suddenly stationary camera at film’s end—the film reminds us that it is but light and shadow and that any new sensibility the film has given us must take hold in our own world where we make our own decisions. Permeated by the social problems of the global economy—with its closed factories, rampant unemployment, and clandestine immigration—the Dardennes’ work becomes critical by teaching us to relate in a physical way, to be sensitive to bodies and objects that we may normally ignore or overlook. The historian Arlette Farge has observed that the Dardennes’ work has a strong tendency to “incarnate history,” and “captures in movement the experience of being in the world at a given moment” (Farge 2008, 134, 136). The point of their cinema is not to relay the viewer into an imaginary world, but to teach him or her to perceive better than before in order to readjust our views and behavior. This book will attempt to describe and interpret the Dardennes’ style through a chronological treatment. The Dardennes’ search for a filmas -handshake has led them on a winding aesthetic journey in search of a [3.137.172.68] Project MUSE (2024...