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.

THE NUDE

The film La Demora [The Stay] opens with a tight close-up of an old man's partial profile. Fittingly for an old man in the early stages of dementia, the frame of the close-up cuts off the top of his head. Stopping the frame makes it apparent that the image could be called “The hanging,” hanging for the position of his slightly drooped head and neck; hanging for the flabby flesh of his cheek and neck, including the flesh of his double chin that forms two small breasts with his chin; and hanging simply for the suggestion of aging flesh and impending death. The tip of the man's nose also appears suspended from the top of the frame, contributing to the sense of fragmentation in the image. In the stilled image, rivulets of water drip down from his face. Director Rodrigo Plá also practices delayed cinema and holds the camera on the old man in this position for at least twenty seconds. The gray-haired chest of the old man trembles slightly in reaction to the water pouring over his head. The water running from an off-screen faucet can be heard but not seen. The visual absence of the water source adds sensory disruption to the uncertainty of the scene.

Plá's camera cuts for several seconds to a shot of the man's left hand resting on his left knee, indicating that he sits in the process of showering. The tight shot focuses on his knees, hand, and lower thighs. Water drips onto and bounces off his knee as though dropping onto an inanimate object. As in the opening take, the scene indicates bodily fragmentation and disjunction. Body parts stand in for and represent the whole man and his being. After several seconds of this long take, the camera cuts again to a close-up of his gray, wet, chest hair. In this opening take the man's identity, situation, and story remain unknown. The scene conveys dependence, vulnerability, uncertainty.

Another cut to a shot from behind the man shows someone's hand at work washing and scrubbing his hair. The camera stays on the back of his head as the hand rather roughly but thoroughly washes around and in his right ear. Then he tilts to the right for the washing of his left ear.

SCORSESE AND THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Critics and commentators tended to see Silence (2016) as a kind of culmination of the themes of redemption, faith, and violence that have pervaded Martin Scorsese's films over several decades. In an article on “The Passion of Martin Scorsese” in The New York Times Magazine that preceded the release of the film, Paul Elie writes, “In his new film, ‘Silence,’ Martin Scorsese returns to a subject that has animated his entire life's work and that also sparked his career's greatest controversy: the nature of faith.” Scorsese said so himself. He told Elie, “I don't know if there's redemption, but there is such a thing as trying to get it right. But how do you do it? The right way to live has to do with selflessness. I believe that. But how does one act that out? I don't think you practice it consciously. It has to be something that develops in you—maybe through a lot of mistakes.”

In her review of Silence, Manohla Dargis, also in The New York Times, similarly notes thematic continuity in Scorsese's filmography. She says that “Mr. Scorsese's work has long involved struggles of faith of one kind or another,” including early films such as Mean Streets (1973) to the more recent The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Dargis writes, “Martin Scorsese's ‘Silence’ is a story of faith and anguish. It tells of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Rodrigues, who in 1643 heads into the dark of Japan, where Christians are being persecuted—boiled alive, immolated and crucified. Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) sets out to help keep the church alive in Japan, a mission that perhaps inevitably leads to God.” Other Scorsese films that have been seen as stories of faith, redemption, and religious conflict often include Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Cape Fear (1991), Kundun (1997), and George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011).

To film critics, The Age of Innocence (1993) not only did not seem to belong on any such list of Scorsese films of faith and redemption, it did not even seem like a Scorsese film.

The theory of “spacious temporality” figures significantly in the fulfillment of the radical existentialism of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Spacious temporality or “this space-time of freedom” develops Nancy's argument for emerging existential presence or the coming and birth to presence. Existential presence occurs as a happening and experience in time, including the intervention of a nonchronological temporal regime that can transform the way of being in the world with the suddenness of a revelation or epiphany. The temporality of emerging presence ineluctably gravitates toward spacious temporality or space-time. Indeed, for Nancy the happening of the birth to existential presence requires spacious temporality. An original thinker and writer, Nancy's existentialism of existence as its own essence must happen in relation to otherness. Nancy writes, “The otherness of existence happens only as ‘togetherness.’” Thus, the otherness of existence for Nancy compels spacious temporality as a dimension of thought and being in a space-time for togetherness.

For Nancy, spacious temporality and space-time mean “the opening of time.” The spacing of time engenders a fresh fluidity and malleability of time. Spacious temporality, as Nancy sees it, opens free space-time for existential freedom to reexamine time itself in the face of groundless being. Nancy writes that free space-time “is opened onto a new spatiality, onto a free space at the heart of which freedom can exist, at the heart of which freedom can be freed or renounced” (EF: 18, 19, 184; emphasis in the original).

Such opening of “free space of time” fosters the singularity of existential presence in its engagement with otherness and the ethical imperative. The freedom of spacious temporality relates the singular to the plural. Spacious temporality invokes “the generosity” of “the plural singularity of ‘us’” (EF: 147). Nancy asserts “freedom is that which spaces and singularizes” (EF: 68).

Spacious temporality can render fresh meaning to Laura Mulvey's paradigm of the dynamic of “delayed cinema” and “stillness and the moving image.” The tension between stillness and the moving image, as described by Mulvey, creates a scenario for dramatizing the existential coming of being and presence. Nancy's spacious temporality insinuates a correlation with the fluidities of shifting time in delayed cinema for the enactment of emerging existential presence.

“TIME IS VIOLENCE”

Jacques Derrida argues that the aporetic impossibility of time and of living outside of presence condemns time to violence. Derrida writes, “There is no experience which can be lived other than in the present. The absolute impossibility of living other than in the present, this eternal impossibility, defines the unthinkable as the limit of reason.” This impossibility invariably commingles time with death and violence. The slippery present moves into loss and absence or fades into smothering abstraction and definition. Derrida writes, “The living present is originally marked by death. Presence as violence is the meaning of finitude, the meaning of meaning as history.” This impossibility of presence and time means that for Derrida “then time is violence.”1

The “living present” of death also means that presence and time commit violence against meaning. The instability and fluidity of time challenge the quest for meaning. Arguing that “time is that which erases … time,” Derrida maintains that “[t]ime has already been suppressed at the moment one asks the question of its meaning, when one relates it to appearing, truth, presence, or essence in general.” He says, “Time is a name for this impossible possibility.” As Levinas argues, time and the search for meaning can become entrapped in suffocating sameness.

Levinas, as previously noted, sees presence as “the time of the Same” that encircles meaning and encloses consciousness into a self-affirming “correlation and equality between what is thought and thinking itself.” Levinas strives to go beyond the synchronicity of presence toward a diachronic temporality that overflows and bursts out of the known, the same, and the thought to a realm of transcendence and the infinite responsibility toward the other.

Tommy Lee Jones in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) turns the Western into a drama of the violence and impossibility of time in its engagement with meaning. The landscape becomes a scene of perennial, inexorable temporal contention. Rather than the spatialization of time through endless expansionism on the virgin American frontier, Jones presents a boundlessly open malleable space of borderline Texas and Mexico that undergoes continuous reconfiguration by a distant, fluid horizon that stretches toward the infinite unknown. The film moves steadily through this temporally shifting space. Time functions as a player in the film in combat for survival with other temporal players.

THE REVENANT (2015): TEMPORAL DUALITY AND THE “VIOLENCE OF THE IMAGE”

With The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu directed a historic revision of the Western genre for our times. Over the history of film, the Western has changed with the creative and intellectual imagination of filmmakers such as Tommy Lee Jones with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) as well as with the interests and impulses of the public. Iñárritu in The Revenant reimagines and reinvents the Western, positioning it in a new dimension of mythical, mystical, and metaphysical interaction and meaning. Under Iñárritu's direction and Emmanuel Lubezki's celebrated cinematography, the film's innovative and creative audio-visual artistry shows rather than merely states and claims a reenvisioning and rethinking of the historic American grand narrative of regeneration through violence on the frontier.

The Revenant tells the story of scout, trapper, and legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, on the American high plains frontier during 1823. Iñárritu and Mark L. Smith adapted and co-wrote the screenplay from Michael Punke's novel (The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge) (2002), which was based on the real-life exploits of the actual frontiersman. It was filmed primarily on the American and Canadian Northwest but also on other worldwide locations such as Argentina. Apparently, Iñárritu and his crews went wherever enough snow could be found to authenticate the setting, a search allegedly made necessary by the damage done to the climate by global warming, as DiCaprio claimed when accepting the Academy Award for his performance in the film.

Iñárritu's achievement in taking the Western genre to new levels of art and meaning rests to a considerable extent upon the temporal aesthetic he establishes for the film. Laura Mulvey's theory of delayed cinema explains the importance to The Revenant of the tension between the stilled frame image and the moving image. Iñárritu creates a careful and rigorous interaction for, in Mulvey's phrase, “the blending of two kinds of time” of stillness and movement. Consistently throughout The Revenant, the basic digital technology of delayed cinema demonstrates how brilliantly constructed framed images in relation to the moving image in the film engender temporal and spatial conditions for emerging existential presence. Mulvey writes, “New moving image technologies, the electronic and the digital, paradoxically allow an easy return to the hidden stillness of the film frame.”

For years now, digital and computer technologies have been redefining and transforming cinema and media. Digital and computer-generated images have tended to supplant traditional film that relies on photography and chemistry, thereby sparking controversy over the putative “death of cinema.” The new digital technologies can readily vary and alter temporal fluctuations and rhythms of film. Such technologies have enabled Laura Mulvey to articulate her own version of the slow cinema movement of recent years. Dubbed “delayed cinema,” the fresh idea of cinema Mulvey proposes in her seminal study, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), exploits digital and computer technological operations for rethinking not just slow cinema but time in cinema.

Delayed cinema as conceptualized and articulated by Mulvey creates possibilities for a fresh discussion of cinematic time in a new philosophical context. Specifically, new thinking about time in delayed cinema can contribute to recent discussions of emerging presence by philosophers committed to the existential challenge for authenticity, immediacy, and intensity in contemporary thought and experience. The sustained tension in film between, in Mulvey's phrase, “stillness and the moving image” enacts an existential drama that directs access not only to the Freudian “uncanny”—the unheimlich—but to the existential coming of being and presence. Mulvey's project of delayed cinema opens new territory in cinema and media studies by concentrating on the stillness of the image in relation to the flow of images that all together constitute a film from the framed image to the launching of the audio-visual trajectory of a film's images and signs. Mulvey's epistemology and method can be used to study the emergence of existential presence in film as a new time and ontology of cinema.

Following Mulvey's theory, it becomes clearer how the tension between stillness and movement in film gives birth to presence. The stillness of the framed film image in relation to the moving image creates the spatial and temporal conditions for an expanded existential presence. Thus, in film, stillness alone turns presence into the living dead; movement alone fails to hold presence, making it a fugitive. The interaction between the two, stillness and the moving image, spawns a new spatio-temporal dimension for emerging existential presence in film.

He doesn't appear on screen for many minutes, but everything has his name on it, including of course the black and white credits that acknowledge him as writer and director and actor. His signature appears everywhere else as well: the “sultry” trumpet of You Made Me Love You that opens the film and immediately breaks into “an up tempo jazz number,” the use of titles that no other director would try in quite that way, the voice-over as the first spoken words in the film, the perfect gag lines. And yet things are also different. Hannah and Her Sisters can be seen as a metaphor for the Woody Allen canon. It is the same and yet different, literally achieving a new plateau of artistic range and unity. A culmination of all his other work, Hannah and Her Sisters includes elements from most of Allen's major films – the comedic but creative schlemiel, the focus on serious women characters of Interiors and Manhattan, complex characterization and narrative, the exploration of ambiguous personal relationships and moral issues, the fusion of comedy and drama, self-conscious cinematography, and visualization; but it also represents a transformation. For those critics who see in Allen's work true milestones in the history of American cinema, Hannah and Her Sisters realizes the creative potential of all of his important films as well as the fulfillment of a promise about his artistic values and objectives that he has made throughout his mature years and repeated in his interview with Eric Lax for the New York Times.