The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers

The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liege-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. A brilliant account of the Dardenne brothers' cinema... their politically engaged social realism and concern with the pauperized victims of global capital are beautifully complemented by the precise lucidity of the author's prose, the nuance of his textual analysis, and his provocative but non-dogmatic social theory. -- David James, University of Southern California An excellent introduction to the Dardenne brothers' films but also a lucid exposition of the historical and intellectual frameworks in which their social realism can be evaluated. This volume also explains how their filmmaking can be understood in terms of major contemporary philosophical currents. -- Felix Thompson, University of Derby, UK