Page - 20 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

20 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 Roger and Igor, Assita and Hamidou in The Promise (1996), Rosetta and Riquet in Rosetta (1999), Olivier and Francis in The Son (2002), Bruno and Sonia in The Child (2005), Lorna, Claudy and Sokol in Le silence de Lorna (The Silence of Lorna, BE/FR/IT/DE 2008), Cyril and Samantha in The Kid with a Bike (2011) and Sandra and Manu in Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night, BE/FR/IT 2014) – are able to tell us what a body is capable of: destruction and consolation, responsibility and exploitation, legacy and abjection, murder and adoption, vio- lence and salvation. Each body – not only the human ones – represents not merely organic or in- organic material, but also the place of an insistence and a hope, from which the belief in life can continue and persist, achieving a possible significance: But perhaps filming gestures and very specific, material things is what allows the viewer to sense everything that is spiritual, unseen, and not a part of materiality. We tend to think that the closer one gets to the cup, to the hand, to the mouth whose lips are drinking, the more one will be able to feel something invisible.16 Consequently, the Dardennes aim at filming “the letter and not the spirit”, since the spirit can only emerge through filming faces, precise gestures and small things. When in The Son (2002), Olivier teaches Francis the skills of his trade, through his very concrete and even brusque carpenter’s gestures, something else seems to emerge. The closer the camera approaches the different wood grains and the more it focuses on the exact dimensions of Francis’s toolbox or on the robust Olivier’s leather belt, the more a transcendent dimension shines through. The phenomenon of (the spiritual) generation here seems to gain its consistency from the very materiality of the world: paternity and filiation oc- cur progressively through the oiling of a measuring stick, through the recog- nising of different types of wood, through a final dramatic struggle between two bodies that does not end in tragedy. In their films “the spirit is a bone”:17 it is precisely by maintaining the contact with the letter, with the material, that the spirit acquires depth and consistency, preventing the body itself from be- coming invisible. So long as Rosetta is keeping contact with her rudimentary world of objects – the broken bottle with which she catches fish on the marshy riverbank, or her pair of boots, which she stores in an unused drainpipe in the woods – she can resiliently but precariously continue to survive, preventing the loss of the last scraps of her humanity. In a similar way, Assita’s nylon shopping bag, which she always carries with her and which contains everything she owns, seems to be the materialisation of her whole biography and memory, her soul. In the material and texture of this cheap, striped object on which the camera fo- 16 West/West 2009, 132. 17 Hegel 1977, 336–340.