Seite - 38 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 02/02

38 | Walter Lesch www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 33–44 of a world of lies and exploitation and to connect with the different cultural values that shape the life of Amidou’s widow. The last scene shows Igor finally telling Assita the truth about her husband’s death and confessing his complicity in Roger’s ruthless behavior. The brothers have stuck faithfully to their Levinasian ethics of filmmaking as their international recognition has grown. Luc Dardenne is interviewed in two significant sequences in Yoram Ron’s documentary Absent God: Emmanuel Levinas and the Humanism of the Other (IL/FR/BE 2014).15 His appearance in the documentary stresses not only the cultural impact of Levinas in the context of the cinema, but also Dardenne’s capacity to use a philosophical language to make explicit his and his brother’s ambition to make a good film. Their success at the Cannes Festival since 1996, the two Palmes d’Or they have received (for Rosetta (FR/BE 1999) and L’enfant (The Child, FR/BE 2005)), and other pres- tigious awards confirm the possibility of a coherent œuvre outside mainstream cinema and without popular ideological references. Before his acceptance in secular contexts by a larger public, Levinas received international attention mainly from scholars of religion who were attracted by his Jewish background and the biblical and Talmudic references in his work. In spite of the legitimate reading of his philosophy by people interested in the intersection of philosophy and religion, Levinas explicitly defined himself as a secular philosopher. His ethical theory insists on the priority of the experience of responsibility and goodness, which can open up a path to the religious sense of transcendence. But this does not work the other way round: a prefabricated idea of God does not open us up to the encounter with the other who is the concrete person we meet face-to-face, and always exceeds the closed totality of a worldview. The same criticism of totality can be found in Levinas’s sceptical view of aesthetics and works of art that cannot be occasions of authentic experience if they imprison the spectator in the illusion of perfection and absoluteness without taking into account the rough reality of human relations. In a certain sense, Levinas is not only the ethical but also the aesthetical thinker to whom the Dardennes feel closer than to any other writer. In an article published in 2007, Sarah Cooper has convincingly shown how we can read Levinas with the Dardenne brothers and vice versa.16 Her careful analysis, which covers the period from The Promise (1996) to The Child (2005), is fully confirmed by the films and publications since 2007. “The Dardenne brothers”, Cooper writes, “exchange death for life in the refusal to repeat radical acts of the suppres- sion of alterity. … Halting the repetition of literal or symbolic killing extends to 15 This remarkable independent film has not found large distribution so far; it can be rented or bought on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/absentgodeng/99223052 [accessed 4 April 2016]. 16 Cooper 2007.