THE DARDENNE BROTHERS. REALITY AND ITS SHADOW
As one of the most forceful and recognisable voices of European social cinema, the Dardenne brothers have forged one of the most coherent and rigorous filmographies in the recent history of the cinema. ZINEBI is awarding the brothers the Mikeldi of Honour in recognition of their indefatigable and exemplary career that began in the documentary genre.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne (Engis, 1951) studied Dramatic Art at IAD (Institut des Arts de Diffusion) while his younger brother Luc (Awirs, 1954) earned a degree in Philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain. At that time, they began making documentary videos under Armand Gatti, the French producer, writer, poet and playwright. They did not hesitate to work at a nuclear power plant to raise sufficient funds to produce their own documentary films. Thanks to that income, they set up the Dérives production company (1975) in Seraing (Wallonia), where they funded over fifty documentaries. The Dardenne brothers between them filmed a series of short and medium-length documentaries focused on Belgium’s recent past and the working class setting of the Liège region, where they were born.
Their most immediate surroundings would soon become the subject of their first documentaries—some of which will be screened at ZINEBI—: in 1977, they embarked on the project entitled Le chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale), where seven people from the Liège region recall their time fighting in the Resistance during World War II; in 1979, in Lorsque le bateau de Léon M. descendit la Meuse pour la première fois (When Léon M.’s Boat Went Down the Meuse for the First Time), they filmed Léon Masy onboard a boat that he had built in his garage in Seraing, through the landscape where he returns to the scene of a general strike in 1960; in 1980, they looked back at an underground newspaper that was published in a Seraing factory in Pour que la guerre s’achève les murs devaient s’écrouler (For the War to End, the Walls Should Have Crumbled); in 1981, they turned their sights to pirate radios in R… ne répond plus (R… No Longer Answers); while in Leçons d’une université volante (Lessons from a University on the Fly), they focused on the accounts of Polish migrants in Belgium during the period that Poland was under martial law; and, in 1983, they turned the spotlight on the playwright Jean Louvet, founder of the Proletarian Theatre of La Louvière, in Regarde Jonathan/Jean Louvet, son oeuvre (Look at Jonathan/Jean Louvet, his Work).
The Dardenne brothers no longer make documentaries, but they continue – as throughout their almost unknown time in the field of militant documentaries –to look beyond their fictional characters. They stress that a documentary goes beyond the camera “to know someone real” and to establish a relationship “with their gaze.” The Dardenne brothers understand that that person can agree to be filmed or may flee from the camera; they are aware that the life of a real person—just like that of their characters— will continue after they have gone, and they want to give fiction that same degree of credibility.
The influence of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s thought on the Dardenne brothers’ films is no secret. The treatment of their fictional characters is based on the ethics of the Lithuania thinker: face-to-face relationship with the otherness, with the Other. They believe filming an individual is to become that person. Luc Dardenne, who attended one of the last courses that Levinas gave, has acknowledged how the philosopher’s work affected his way of thinking and acting. The title of one of Levinas’s essays serves to define the work of the Dardenne brothers: they believe art is the shadow of reality.
Thus, with the same commitment to the Other—with the filmed subject— which defined the Jewish author and philosopher, the Dardenne brothers embarked on their fictional films with the peculiar Falsch (1986), even though it would not be until the La promesse (The Promise) (1996) that they would achieve international renown. They would then go on and compete in the 1999 Cannes Official Section and win their first Palme d’Or, thanks to Rosetta (1999). No filmmaker has won the top prize of the world’s most important festival three times, but Dardenne do belong to the exclusive group who have won it twice (along with Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, Ken Loach and Michael Haneke), thanks to the Palme d’Or for L’enfant (The Child, 2005). The success in Cannes, however, also includes the prizes for the best screenplay—for Le silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence, 2008)—, for the best director—for Le jeune Ahmed (Young Ahmed, 2019)— and the Grand Prix awarded by the Jury—for Le gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike, 2011).
Rubén CorralProgrammer at ZINEBI
