Seite - 37 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/02

Realistic Humanism | 37www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 33–44 versial way of thinking about concepts like otherness, totality and infinity, and of translating these abstract notions into everyday experiences. LUC DARDENNE, LOUVAIN AND LEVINAS The Dardenne brothers, and particularly Luc, have contributed much to the rel- evance of Levinas in the world of cinema. This is not surprising as Luc’s years as a student of philosophy at the University of Louvain12 put him in touch with this thinker, who is very influential in Louvain intellectual circles because of the long-standing tradition of phenomenological research in the context of the Husserl archives.13 In 1976, when Levinas was still less known in France (even though this was the year of his retirement from the Sorbonne), the University of Louvain awarded him an honorary doctorate. Dardenne had the opportunity to meet Levinas when he came to Louvain-la-Neuve in 1980 for a series of lec- tures on the topic of death and during his time as a visiting professor, when he held the Mercier Chair. Even if Luc Dardenne mentions other great philosophical writers he admires, especially Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernst Bloch and Hannah Arendt, Levinas has without a doubt influenced him most. Luc approached Levinas in Paris about a documentary on Bloch (not yet realised) and was deeply impressed by their conversation, which opened his eyes to the difficulty of acting as a free and responsible person. When Levinas died in December 1995, the Dardennes were busy with La Promesse (The Promise, BE/LU/FR 1996), the first film in which they fully apply their very personal style, after a great number of documenta- ries and two fictional features that they themselves consider failures. In Janu- ary 1996, Luc Dardenne noted in his diary that Levinas died while they were shooting their film. Without this philosopher’s radical interpretation of the face- to-face encounter and the relevance of the human face, they would not have imagined their scenario as they did.14 In the film, Igor discovers his moral re- sponsibility in the corrupt world of his father, Roger, who rents out apartments to illegal immigrants. One of them, Amidou, has an accident from which he will not recover. Igor promises to take care of his wife, Assita, and their baby. It is the encounter with the injured Amidou’s face that allows Igor to find a way out 12 The Catholic University of Louvain was officially split into Dutch-speaking and French-speaking parts in 1968. After the formal separation, the Institute of Philosophy remained in the old Flemish town for one more decade until the final relocation of the Institut supérieur de philosophie to Louvain-la-Neuve in Wallonia in 1978. Luc Dardenne wrote his dissertation for the licentiate degree in 1979, about Casto- riadis’s Imaginary Institution of Society, under the supervision of Jean Ladrière. Dardenne published a detailed review of this book in the Revue philosophique de Louvain (Dardenne 1981). The Dardennes were artists in residence at the University of Louvain (UCL) in 2006, and received honorary doctorates at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in 2010. 13 Levinas is one of the authors who introduced Husserl and Heidegger to the French public. 14 Dardenne 2005, 56.