Page - 17 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Reality and Paternity | 17www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 disruptive weight of life, love and death. In this way, believing in the world has become the most difficult task, which has to catalyse the present possibility of thought and narration, since it is for Deleuze the problem of thought and nar- ration. This intense search for the possibility to maintain a relation with the world and perpetuate life despite the intolerability of the world – or because of the in- tolerability of the world – seems to characterise the Dardennes’ cinema as well. According to Luc Dardenne, “What is more important for a film is to reconstruct some human experience. That is a shock, due to the absence of such an experi- ence in our present.”4 The Dardennes resist the “destruction of experience”5 and memory that affect the post-political micro-society of the disaffected, sub- urban Belgian community, representing its acute crisis of conscience and ac- tion.6 They describe the expropriation and the marginalised life of discarded singularities in a world in which experience has transformed into something unbearable. Their films aim to offer the tactile and raw substance of the actual world that appears to be dominated by the reifying ultimate development of the consumer society, in which “all that is solid melts into air”.7 By means of their disruptive and de-aestheticised realism, the Dardennes seek to reconstruct a possible consistency of experience within the brutal dis- positif of post-industrial society. However, the missing link between subjects and the world cannot be replaced by knowledge, a dream state, morality or the faith in another world, but by a fundamental belief in this world and in its materiality. The films of the Dardennes represent the hopeful search for the signs of humanity within the deterritorialised scenery of Seraing and Cockerill in the Walloon region. Here they observe closed factories, depopulated districts, post-apocalyptic atmospheres, under- or unemployed people and exploited il- legal migrants – the stigmata of late-capitalistic society. In La promesse (The Promise, BE/FR/LU/TN 1996), young Igor does not resign himself to this wasted underworld, but gradually reacts to this inhumanity, breaking its perverse circle through his hope for another future. In Rosetta (FR/BE 1999) the 17-year-old resilient Rosetta continues to struggle to find a job and some glimmer of iden- tity despite the degradation and exhaustion of her familial and social milieu.8 4 Dardenne 2009, 7 (my own translation throughout the article). 5 Agamben 1993, 11–16. 6 “Why does this land refuse to watch itself? What do they fear? Why do they have this contempt of social life, of history? Why do they escape toward something called ‘imaginary’? It is sympto- matic that nobody has made a film on the deportation in camps of twenty-five thousand Jews” (Dardenne 2009, 35). 7 Marx/Engels 1992, 6. 8 Through “her story, which Luc calls the ‘portrait of an époque’, the film taps into the employ- ment malaise of 1990s Europe. … In 1998, the year Rosetta was shot, more than half of Belgians under 25 years old had not found a job six months after finishing their schooling, with the worst numbers in French-speaking Wallonia” (Mai 2010, 65–66).