Page - 34 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

34 | Walter Lesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 33–44 scape of an old industrial region in Wallonia,2 an area where people have to cope with the transformation of economy and society. But this does not mean that the films carry an unequivocal ideological message of committed art. Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne are interested in individuals as they really are, with their hopes and fears, ambitions and destructive tendencies. This realism be- comes “responsible” because of the directors’ interest in the ethical challenge of facing difficulties and despair without abandoning the necessity of looking for orientation and paths towards a better future. The Dardennes’ characters are often lost in situations of hopelessness and in traumatic experiences,3 but the spectators are invited to follow them as they struggle for dignity and the improvement of their living conditions without any guarantee of success. The characters are neither angels nor demons. They are depicted as more or less restlessly searching people who are trying to make sense of a complicated life without referring to big theories such as philosophical, political or religious tra- ditions. With the help of a philosophical reading of the films, this article tries to suggest a hermeneutical key that gives access to the notion of “realistic humanism”,4 which is, of course, not very far from Mosley’s fully appropriate label of “responsible realism” for the Dardennes’ films. The focus on humanism is inspired by Luc Dardenne’s book The Human Affair.5 Even though this text does not explicitly make a link to the entirety of the films, it can be read as the most coherent presentation of the sources mentioned in Luc Dardenne’s two published diaries,6 which cover the period of the brothers’ activities since the beginning of their shift from documentaries to fiction films. A preliminary remark is necessary in order to avoid the false impression that Luc Dardenne is the intellectual and Jean-Pierre Dardenne is the more practi- cal part of the duo. On various occasions, they have shown that they are both equally involved in preparing and realising their films – an impressive embodi- ment of the dialectics of proximity and otherness. The fact is that Luc Dardenne (born in 1954) is a former student of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Louvain, whereas his brother (born in 1951) studied dramatic arts at the Thea- tre and Film Academy IAD (Institut des arts de diffusion), a college of art founded in 1959 in Brussels and later transferred to Louvain-la-Neuve. As screenwriters for their films, the brothers collaborate closely and are primarily interested in 2 See Dillet/Puri 2013. 3 See Lesch 2013. 4 This expression also refers to the title of Putman’s book (1990), where the notion of realism with a hu- man face implies the epistemological position according to which the world cannot be described from a God’s eye view. Values and facts are entangled and can be accessed only through the communicative action of finite human beings. 5 Dardenne 2012. 6 Dardenne 2005; Dardenne 2015.