lorna's silence

This article was downloaded by: [King's College London] On: 16 May 2015, At: 00:25 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK New Review of Film and Television Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20 Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers Joseph Mai a a Department of Languages , Clemson University , 717 Strode Tower, PO Box 340535, Clemson, SC, 29634-0535, USA Published online: 26 Oct 2011. To cite this article: Joseph Mai (2011) Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9:4, 435-453, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2011.606532 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.606532 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions RESEARCH ARTICLE Lorna’s Silence and Levinas’s ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers Joseph Mai* Department of Languages, Clemson University, 717 Strode Tower, PO Box 340535, Clemson, SC 29634-0535, USA This paper explores the possibilities of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical description of the ethical life for understanding the experience of viewing a film, and this with two related goals in mind. The first is to provide a sustained Levinasian reading of the Dardenne Brothers’ Lorna’s Silence as an alternative to political or traditionally ethical approaches. This is necessary because the sensuous quality of Lorna’s moral conversion is best understood through a set of metaphors used by Levinas to describe his ‘pre- ontological’ ethical philosophy: metaphors of the caress, the feminine and maternity. A second goal is to account for how this film’s formal qualities create an encounter between viewer and film that echoes Lorna’s encounters in the fictional world. To this end, the paper squares Levinasian ethics with Andre´ Bazin’s realism by trimming from Bazin’s work the notion of a gathered, individual subjectivity and emphasizing themes of encounter and dislocation. Lorna’s Silence gives a fresh illustration of the cinema’s power to encourage viewers to strive toward an altruistic notion of human relations. Keywords: Dardenne Brothers; Lorna’s Silence; Levinas; Andre´ Bazin; ethical criticism Since the beginning of their career, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have explicitly sought to produce images of people and places that would contribute to their viewers’ ethical consciousness. They have even allegorized this quest on-screen, in their contribution to the Chacun son cinema (2007), a collection of shorts in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes festival. In the collection, several well-known filmmakers were commissioned to film their vision of the space of the film theater. The brothers’ three-minute vignette, Dans l’obscurite´, begins with a hungry-looking young hoodlum crawling through a dark cinema to snatch the purse of a solitary viewer, played by Emilie Dequenne (of Rosetta). The camera pans to Dequenne’s tear-soaked face, glowing in the light of Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). As the film-in-the-film ends, Dequenne’s emotion sweeps her away so strongly that she reaches down, touches the boy’s ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.606532 http://www.tandfonline.com *Email: jmai@clemson.edu New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2011, 435–453 D ow nl oa de d by [K ing 's Co lle ge L on do n] at 00 :25 16 M ay 20 15 hand with hers and raises it to her lips for an embrace. The short thus seems to imply that the cinema, through its way of involving us emotionally, can make us respond by reaching out to others. Dans l’obscurite´ is just a short film a` these, but a similar scene appears as well in their ambitious feature, Le silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence, 2008). Again, at the end we find Lorna, after an intense moral conversion, who has escaped from her pursuers to an abandoned hunting shack in the middle of the woods. Darkness descends, but she has built a fire to warm herself and the unborn child she thinks she carries in her womb. In the last shot, we see her face in close-up, faintly but warmly radiant in the light of the fire. This framing and staging echo Dans l’obscurite´, as well as a number of memorable characters that litter the history of cinema and who seek refuge at the movies. Though perhaps unintentional, such resemblances do invite us to compare Lorna’s story, her encounter with another and a determination to do right, and the light of her fire, with our experience as viewers. Beyond presenting salient ethical situations to our sympathy and deliberation, the Dardennes also ask us to measure the ethical value of the light that brightens our faces in the dark of the cinema. Adapted from a real-life story, Lorna’s Silence follows a group of criminals enmeshed in an illegal immigration scheme. An Albanian, Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) obtains Belgian citizenship in a ‘white wedding’ with Claudy, a drug addict in an advanced stage of addiction (Je´re´mie Renier). Claudy is such a hopeless case that everyone involved assumes he will soon overdose, after which Lorna will marry a Russian seeking citizenship for more money. In the unlikely case that he doesn’t die on his own, the ringleader Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) has an overdose planned for him. Lorna will use her cut to open a snack shop in Lie`ge with her actual lover, Sokol, who is busy making money as fast as he can in various European nuclear plants. Each member of the group is working in his or her self-interest, and each seems to dislike most of the others. Each must accept enslavement to this synchronized system in order to reap future benefits. By assuming these roles and treating others as instruments, each works to preserve the system. Before getting to what I feel to be the proper ethical lens through which to understand this film, we can rule out a few other approaches. One would seek to link Lorna’s conversion to a series of political positions or themes that play a role in the film’s content: immigration, gender, class or crime, for example. The Dardennes have always dealt seriously with aspects of human life that touch upon these themes, and yet readings that stress them strike me as hopelessly wide of the crux of the film, which centers on Lorna’s growing ethical consciousness, first awakened when Claudy decides that he wants to live and asks her for help. Drawn toward him, despite the threat that helping poses to her plans, she helps him kick his habit and winds up making love to him. She is not able to save him however: Fabio makes good on his threat and Lorna’s own life is in jeopardy. The film ends with Lorna hiding out for the night in the shack and no clear political (or other) solution in sight. In many ways, Lorna’s class and gender identity are secondary: her situation is tied to more universal problems such as guilt and redemption. J. Mai436 D ow nl oa de d by [K ing 's Co lle ge L on do n] at 00 :25 16 M ay 20 15 Because of this, the film has been condemned by some as lacking in class consciousness and politically nihilistic.1 However, one might persuasively argue that the lack of political solution stems rather from a failing of grand-narrative and identity politics to provide answers to plights like Lorna’s, and that such criticisms betray a political nostalgia. In my conclusion, I will indicate how the Dardennes bring their viewers toward politics from the direction of ethical consciousness, in a way that can only be frustrating if we look to works of art to reinforce a complacent political view. Another approach, that of most traditional ethical philosophers who become interested in film, would be to judge Lorna as if she represented a moral conundrum, offered up for our analysis. However, the film sets obstacles in our way if we try to piece together a coherent moral argument. The first problem concerns how we can judge Lorna’s motivations. As she attempts to return to her regular life after Claudy’s death, she discovers that she has become pregnant with his child. Or she at least thinks so, though she is told more than once that she is undergoing a phantom pregnancy. The film makes this very clear: she is not biologically pregnant and there is no living link between her and Claudy. However, her body tells her differently, as if her moral conscience were so intense that it manifested itself in a physical change. A deontologist might note that Lorna is acting out of good intentions, despite the fact that her beliefs are wrong, and that therefore her behavior can be just. A consequentialist could argue that if her actions bring good into the world, she is behaving well despite her confused intentions. However, moral reasoning might also allow us to simply judge Lorna as stressed, misled by emotion and therefore in need of some rest. It is then easy for a viewer to discount Lorna’s actions as the ravings of a madwoman.2 If Lorna’s moral responsibility is manifested in her bodily senses, moral reasoning is far too intellectual and unengaged. The non-traditional ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is a far better alternative than this distanced view for understanding how a moral conscience is formed. In a passage that bears a close resemblance to the film, Levinas makes the case that ethics is more akin to a feeling that one is possessed by another: Where to be? How to be? It is a writhing in the tight dimensions of pain, the unsuspected dimensions of the rejection into the negative, behind nothingness; it is maternity, gestation of the other in the same. Is not the restlessness of someone persecuted but a modification of maternity, the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it will bear or has borne? In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. (1998, 75) Ethics is not cold moral deliberation by an autonomous individual, but is the restless perception that one’s ‘own’ self living for another growing within it, taking it over. If film is to have some bearing on ethics and moral deliberation, we will first have to redefine along these lines what it means to be a self in the world. A film should not reinforce our political or intellectual habits; it should persecute us and goad us into a confrontation with the other who constitutes us. In my concluding New Review of Film and Television Studies 437 D ow nl oa de d by [K ing 's Co lle ge L on do n] at 00 :25 16 M ay 20 15 section, I will explore how Le silence de Lorna seeks to touch the viewer through the very forms by which this content comes to us.3 To do so I will rely on the writings of Andre´ Bazin and their description of the psychological power of cinematic realism. Bazin has often been described as an ‘ontologist’ of the cinema, linking its affective power to photography’s mechanical reproduction of reality, giving the cinema a direct connection to its subject matter. Bazin famously wrote that the cinema is ‘of its essence a dramaturgy of Nature’ (1967c, 111).4 On the one hand, there is dramaturgy – the abstraction through which reality is filtered by a conscious subject, the artist, for another conscious subject, the viewer; on the other, there is Nature – the essence of reality, for the first time present independently of the artist’s hand. Through realism, the cinema seems to lift faces and objects out of the ineluctable flow of time for us to encounter. The move from mechanical to digital reproduction, as Dudley Andrew has recently argued, does not diminish this realistic power. However, bringing together Bazin and Levinas does require that we sort through a confusion that may lurk in Bazin’s theory. It sometimes looks like Bazin puts an inordinate stock in the cinema’s ability to respond to the human fear of death, which he calls the ‘mummy complex’, and his writing is strewn with references to death masks, the shroud of Veronica and other miraculous means of overcoming time. Bazin sometimes seems to suggest that a certain style, that of deep-focus, sequence shot photography, best approximates a real relation between an intentional subject and reality. This can evoke the existentialist evocations of the angst that comes with the consciousness of mortality. For Levinas, this makes far too much of death. He even argues that the obsession with death and the autonomous, individual subject have blinded us to ethics altogether: Essence is interest. Being’s interest takes dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together. . . . Essence thus is the extreme synchronism of war. (Levinas 1998, 4) The concern for mortal self makes us simply ignore the other or place him or her in an intellectual pigeonhole. Levinas would like to see this war ‘desynchronized’. On the other hand, recent work, especially Andrew’s book, has made it clear that we can recast Bazin’s work in an ethical manner, where the emphasis would be on how cinematic images, the bandages of the mummy or the mask of the dead, provide the viewer with a troubling – indeed desynchronizing – encounter with something beyond one’s self. Realism’s power would then disrupt our sense of home in the world and upend our habitual ways of seeing. The home and the feminine Levinas moves away from identity and ontology by telling a different story about subjectivity. In Being and Time, as Levinas’s prefacer Richard Cohen tells us, Heidegger describes embodiment ‘in terms of instrumental praxis, mortal anxiety, and historical engagement in being’ (1998, xiv). However, for Levinas J. Mai438 D ow nl oa de d by [K ing 's Co lle ge L on do n] at 00 :25 16 M ay 20 15 life is neither absurd nor even a struggle, but a positive striving that is the very meaning of life. He puts nourishment, ‘living from . . . ’ and enjoyment at the core of identity. Eating, breathing, reproduction and otherwise living from the elemental world do not merely sustain our biological bodies. We experience these activities as the ‘love of life’ (Levinas 1969, 112), and our embodied existence gains significance directly through sensibility rather than through calculations or representations formed in thought: ‘One does not know, one lives sensible qualities’ (135). However, enjoyment does not bestow ethics on the subject. Resources are limited and the risk to pure enjoyment leads us to various forms of social intercourse as we are forced to relay between self and the outer world. Our ‘care for the morrow’ leads us to labor, social interaction, even to the language in which we share concepts and wishes (Levinas 1969, 139). Through these practices, we reinforce the self-sufficiency of the I. One of the most important ways we achieve this is by building a home, a position from which we can confront the world: ‘To be separated is to be at home with oneself’ (147). The home is more than the ‘spontaneous agreeableness of the elements’, but it is not yet the ethical relation (155). Building a home gives the separated self a haven from which to encounter others, but also from which we can ignore the other. Habitation and enjoyment do not conclude Levinas’s story; in fact, these will be disrupted with great upheaval when the subject is exposed to the other. Until Levinas arrived at his treatment of the home in Totality and Infinity, he had avoided any gender specification in his account of subjectivity. However, within the home he removes the rib of Adam and creates the feminine. Here the subject comes to rest and is welcomed; it finds a caregiver, a hospitable other, the feminine (Levinas 1969, 170). Nevertheless, this welcoming other seems to be left by the wayside when the subject is exposed to the face of the truly other, who ‘paralyzes’ my possessions, comes to me from above, and teaches me (171). The feminine other of Totality and Infinity, therefore, isn’t ‘the vous of the ethical other. She is a “thou” of familiarity: a language without teaching, a silent language, an understanding without words, an expression in secret’ (155). Real teaching comes in the face-to-face encounter outside of the home, where we encounter a risky challenge to our self. The feminine therefore, though part of the conditions for ethics, is still, like work and habitation, implicated in the time of Being. If encountering the other is to uproot our home, then it must also uproot femininity. As we will see shortly, Levinas will abandon this concept for the less complacent notion of maternity. This feminine corresponds fairly closely to how the brothers represent Lorna in the early parts of the film. Homemaking here is woven into the illegal scheme of Lorna and her conspirators, as if looking at others as tools and building a home were parts of one system. After some footsteps heard over a dark screen we cut immediately to a close-up of Lorna’s hands counting out bills at a bank window. This Bressonian shot of her hands suggests that agency comes less from her than from the power of money itself, as if its circulation or ‘synchronization’ rather than her will drives their movement. The following scene shows Lorna at a telephone New Review of Film and Television Studies 439 D ow nl oa de d by [K ing 's Co lle ge L on do n] at 00 :25 16 M ay 20 15 shop smiling and speaking to Sokol