Lorna's Silence and Levinas's ethical alternative: form and viewer in the Dardenne Brothers
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 André 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.
Meaning of 'Labor' and Aesthetic in Dardenne Brothers' Films
Dardenne brothers' films deals with minorities' issues who are shoved out to periphery of society, and especially takes interest in value-deprived human life in labor market of today. This study examines such social awareness of Dardenne brothers targeting their latest works awarded in Cannes Film Festival, <Rosetta>, <The Son>, <The Child>, <Lorna's Silence>, <The Kid with a Bike>. And analysis is attempted about Dardenne brothers' unique formal aesthetical style that exactly captures such social awareness. In Dardenne brothers' films a person shows up who faces abject matter of living. Their agony is closely connected to unemployment, and shows images of irresistible anxiety and alienation. Dardenne brothers' images are not only simple platform with contents embodied, but designed form showing essential thematic consciousness. Location and gaze, motion of camera capturing a character makes us to reflect the situation a character is facing in the world. There are almost no regard about plots, no dramatic devices, superficial and even straightforward, but Dardenne brothers’ films have such independent formal aesthetic, which makes able to give endless tension.
EL TRATAMIENTO NEOPRAGMATISTA DE LA VERDAD EN RICHARD RORTY NEOPRAGMATIST TREATMENT OF TRUTH IN RICHARD RORTY
Richard Rorty, one of the most influential authors of our time, presents a critique of the philosophical concept of truth as correspondence. The conclusion of Rorty's neopragmatism is that the idea of truth as correspondence between language and facts is ineffective because it no longer works. The neopragmatist conception of truth indicates the only possible uses for the term «truthful,» revolving around the idea of jus - tification. In this article, the neopragmatist notion of truth is presented in order to