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The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liège-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers’ career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes’ work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne trained as an actor and his younger brother, Luc, studied philosophy; but they have dedicated themselves to filmmaking since the 1970s. After earning a reputation in their native Belgium for directing socially and politically conscious documentaries, they directed their first fiction feature, Falsch, in 1986. They have also been active as producers and in 1975 founded Derives, a company with more than sixty documentaries to its credit. A second company, Les Films du Fleuve, was formed in 1994. The brothers hail from Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking region of Belgium that provides the gritty, postindustrial landscape so omnipresent in their films. In the decade sin...
In this book-length study of the Belgian brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Joseph Mai delivers sophisticated close analyses of their directorial style and explores the many philosophical issues dealt with in their films.
The Dardenne Brothers’ Cinematic Parables examines the work of Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have been celebrated for their powerfully affecting social realist films. Though the Dardenne brothers’ films rarely mention religion or God, they have received wide recognition for their moral complexity and spiritual resonance. This book brings the Dardennes’ filmography into consideration with theological aesthetics, Christian ethics, phenomenological film theory, and continental philosophy. The author explores the brothers’ nine major films—beginning with The Promise (1996) and culminating in Young Ahmed (2019)—through the hermeneutics of philosopher Paul Ricoeu...
Since 1995 there has been a widespread return of commitment to French cinema taking it to a level unmatched since the heady days following 1968. But this new wave of political film is very different and urgently calls out for an analysis that will account for its development, its formal characteristics and its originality. This is what this book provides. It engages with leading directors such as Cantet, Tavernier, Dumont, Kassovitz, Zonca and Guédiguian, takes in a range of less well known but important figures and strays across the Belgian border to engage with the seminal work of the Dardenne brothers. It shows how the works discussed are helping to reinvent political cinema by finding stylistic and narrative strategies adequate to the contemporary context.
In European Directors and Their Films: Essays on Cinema, Bert Cardullo offers readable analyses of some of the most important film artists and individual films of the last several decades. Beyond simple biographical capsules and plot summaries, these readings demonstrate with elegance and clarity what cinema means as well as shows, explaining how international moviemakers use the resources of the medium to pursue complex, significant human goals.
"Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are giants in contemporary world cinema, steadfastly radical in both principles and approach. Their films tackle social and political issues by focusing keenly on the intimate stories of individuals locked into their fates by unjust systems. Now available for the first time in English, this two volume set collects over 20 years of Luc's journals as the brothers work through their films, along with the shooting scripts of these films. For creative people in any discipline, this is the document of a master artist's mind at work, measuring sustained introspection against true and constant engagement in the lived world. Filmmakers will get extended lessons on conceptualization, collaboration, and execution. Students and fans of contemporary cinema will gain insight to the thought and effort that's behind each image."--Provided by publisher.
The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liège-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers’ career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival, for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005). It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes’ work complements rather than precludes their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.
This book features interviews with 13 major international directors: Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Luchino Visconti, Abbas Kiarostami, Ermanno Olmi, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Zhang Yimou, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Jacques Tati, Eric Rohmer, and Fran_ois Truffaut.
An authoritative study of this postsecular film movement from the French-Belgian border region that rose to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century. At the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, two movies from northern-Francophone Europe swept almost all the main awards. Rosetta by the Walloon directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the Golden Palm, and L’humanité by the French director Bruno Dumont won the Grand Prize; both won acting awards as well. Taking this “miracle” of Cannes as the point of departure, Niels Niessenidentifies a transregional film movement in the French-Belgian border region—the Cinéma du Nord or “cinema of the North.” He examines this movement within ...