C’est dans son œuvre tardive, à partir des années 1990, que Ricœur élabore le thème de la promesse. À la même époque, mais sur une autre scène, Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne ont, en moins de dix ans, réalisé quatre films à forte résonance éthique. Le premier de ces films – qui, à bien des égards,...

Does cinema express or engender political thought? Can we think of cinema, or certain specific cinematic texts, as bodies of political theory? In this paper I provide a positive response to such questions by arguing for a notion of, what I want to call, cinema as political critique. In order to make sense of this idea and render it more concrete, I will draw on fragments of the political theory of Jürgen Habermas and will discuss and give an analysis of (...) a popular and relatively recent Hollywood film: Gary Ross's Pleasantville . Reading Habermasian themes in and through Pleasantville, I will argue that this text can be seen as a concrete instance of political critique and, more particularly, as a form of political critique that ethically implies a certain conception of freedom. (shrink)

Prior to the productive encounters that can be staged between Emmanuel Levinas’sthought and cinema at the level of reception, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne introducehis philosophy to their filmmaking at its moment of inception.1Luc Dardenne’s diary Audos de nos images documents their filmmaking from 1991 to 2005, and isinterspersed with brief but erudite references to Levinas’s work. While Levinasianthinking is one among many cited influences in this text, which also features quotationsfrom the writings of novelists, poets, and other philosophers, along with (...) detailedreferences to other filmmakers, his work is a signal point of inspiration and ethicalaspiration for their filmmaking. The Dardenne brothers seek permanently to unsettlereceived ideas of what cinema is. In this, their approach is bound up explicitly, but notexclusively, with the ethical underpinnings of Levinas’s thought. Levinas’s reformulationof ethics as first philosophy creates a fissure at the root of the philosophy of being. TheDardennes’ films, in turn, perform a Levinasian-inspired challenge to the being ofcinema. At its most extreme moments, to kill or not to kill is the key question that theircinema raises. This tacit rewriting of the interrogative opening to Hamlet’s infamous soliloquy, shifts attention away from a self-centered concern with being or non-being,and towards the survival of the other. The passage from being to non-being, whichwould involve the death of the subject, is displaced here by a preoccupation with killing,or failing to kill, someone else. This particular move from dying to killing lies at the heartof the Dardennes’ mortal ethics. (shrink)