THE DARDENNE BROTHERS AND THE CINEMA OF FREE SPACE-TIME: BACKGROUND

At the beginning of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night (2015), Sandra Bya (Marion Cotillard) awakens from a deep sleep to learn that a death sentence hangs over her in the form of being fired from her job. This news at her awakening sparks the beginning of a journey of initiation on many levels. On one epistemic level, she learns about the realities of an economic and political system that values people according to their economic worth as opposed to their contribution to society as moral and ethical beings. She discovers the force within herself to engage and overcome that system with her own acquired values of sharing her time and place with others. She also undergoes a journey of existential identity that culminates in a revelation of existential freedom through her new relations with others. In her existential encounter with her own inner darkness of alienation, worthlessness, and non-being, Sandra awakens to an ethical demand of infinite responsibility for others that enables her to achieve her place in a new temporal regime that challenges a way of being and a world view based on death. She proposes an alternative way, an existential and ethical commitment to life.

Two Days, One Night comes as a recent addition to the long-celebrated work of the Belgian filmmakers and brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In this film and in their work in general, the Dardenne brothers commingle a contemporary neo-realistic mise en scène with an ethical philosophy of existential presence. Over several decades for film critics and scholars, the films of the Dardennes have marked a continuation and a culmination of a style, art, and philosophy of filmmaking and editing that go back to mid-century Italian neo-realism and French art cinema. The Dardenne brothers’ established and widely acclaimed body of work has contributed to this film history with their innovative development of a unique, postmodern, neo-realistic cinema.

The Dardenne brothers clearly see the connection between their work and Italian neo-realism, the film movement of basic importance to the brothers’ significance and influence on a postmodern, neo-realistic mise en scène aesthetic that grounds their ethically attuned cinema.