Page - 10 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

10 | Stefanie Knauss www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 9–14 ticular on the theme of paternity as one moment when belief in the world has been disrupted and might be recreated. Walter Lesch’s philosophical-ethical contribution explores the subtle, yet decisive influence of Emmanuel Levinas and his philosophy of the ethical claim of the other on Luc Dardenne, and Luc Dardenne’s own philosophical contributions in his writings and cinema. In my contribution I introduce the perspectives of gender studies, feminist ethics, and Christian ethics to ask how the interaction of individual freedom and social structures shapes the lives of men and women in the worlds of family and work. With their varied approaches, the three articles explore specific aspects of the vast question of the search for the human in the cinema of the Dardennes. In this editorial, I will focus on two more general issues, namely the two main strategies that I think characterize on a fundamental level their filmic search for the human, with their particular interest for theology and religious studies. One strategy is to focus closely on the material world as it is, as the condition for the existence of human beings, in a realist (but not naturalist, as Philip Mosley points out2) mode of filmmaking. More than simply empirical facts, the mate- rial world and in particular the materiality of human bodies are revealing of a particular situation and of human existence within it, with its tensions, disrup- tions, anxieties, and hopes. Thus, the directors’ visual focus on the surface of the world and human bodies is not superficial but rather allows the materiality of the world to assume its full importance as the condition of human existence: these are the objects, the textures, the material encounters, the skin, hair, and clothes, and the gestures and actions in and through which human beings exist and express themselves. The materiality of the world and of human beings is shown to be the place of human existence, rather than instruments or hard- ware to be used, and thus is attributed a particular and quiet dignity of its own. From a theological perspective, it is interesting to note that the Dardennes’ attention to the materiality of the world and the concreteness of human being and acting is deeply situated in the empirical, yet at the same time transcends it in the “integration of the empirical and the transcendental, of the visible and the unseen.”3 The capacity for transcendence of the material is realized in two ways in the films of the Dardennes: through close-ups and steady, long shots of what is in front of the camera, attending to the material world in its myste- rious presence, and through an eliptical style with cuts that often leave large gaps in the narrative and underline the impossibility of visually capturing reality and human existing and acting within it. Focusing on the visible and allowing the invisible to claim its space, the filmmakers delineate the different ways in which the material integrates the transcedent: first, in the ability of what is to 2 Cf. Mosley 2013, 9. 3 Mosley 2013, 17.