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Abstract
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.
Notes
1. The most convinced and critical such reading of this film is by David Walsh at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/sep2008/tff5-s29.shtml. See O'Shaughnessy (Citation2008) for a discussion of the Dardennes' position in relation to Leftist political projects.
2. This view defines her as a hysteric in need of the psychotherapeutic treatment often given to women in this condition. A number of secondary characters offer this diagnosis, including the medical professionals. Interestingly enough Fabio wholeheartedly embraces this diagnosis, for he realizes that writing Lorna off as deluded makes her easier to battle with in the struggles of self-interest. This psychological interpretation may explain Lorna's delusion, but it is also a convenient means of control.
3. I would like to express here many thanks to my colleague Diane Perpich who opened her spring 2010 seminar on Levinas so that I might lead a discussion about Levinas and the Dardennes with her students. This paper owes a considerable debt to that seminar, discussions with Diane and her book (Perpich Citation2008).
4. CitationStanley Cavell also cites this phrase in the opening pages of The World Viewed (1979, 16).
5. ‘[B]ut already human egoism leaves pure nature by virtue of the human body raised upwards, committed in the direction of height’ (Levinas Citation1969, 117).
6. In one touching scene we see her visit Claudy in the hospital and observe his (unseen to us) face as he sleeps – a subtle reference to Levinas's ‘face-to-face’ metaphor. See Cooper (Citation2007) for a discussion of the face-to-face moment in other Dardenne films.
7. Levinas summarized his career in a later, autobiographical text as being oriented toward this goal: ‘in the place of ontology – of the Heideggerian comprehension of the Being of being – is substituted as primordial the relation of a being to a being, which is none the less not equivalent to a rapport between subject and object, but rather to a proximity to a relation with the Other [Autrui]’ (1997, 293).
8. Irigaray prefers Levinas's writing on the caress in Time and the Other, as opposed to later descriptions of voluptuousness (and its close association with procreation) in Totality and Infinity (‘voluptuousness as the very event of the future’ says Levinas [Citation1990, 90]), which she finds too male-centered and temporal. For Irigaray, Levinasian ‘fecundity’ is something that should be ‘prior to any procreation, the lovers bestow on each other’ (1993, 190). Irigaray calls Levinas's view in Totality and Infinity an ‘autistic transcendence’ that once again excludes women (1993, 210).
9. Sam Girgus (Citation2007) has analyzed some classic American melodramas from a Levinasian viewpoint, but admits that they often confuse the maternal with a biological status. However, in the Dardennes, even works like The Child (2005) underplay the biological presence of the child. The baby in that film is played by some 17 actual babies and a rubber dummy. This is possible because it almost never clearly appears on-screen. Lorna makes the anarchy of ethics less ambiguous, but the fundamental idea is the same.
10. The filmmaker Sólveig Anspach is the first, to my knowledge, to remark upon the connection of the two scenes in the excellent interview she conducts with the brothers on the British DVD release of the film.
11. The fact that Dobroshi had to learn French quickly, as she filmed, reflects her character's evolution. First, we witness, through sight and sound, her literal bodily transformation as she learns to speak differently. French is the language of relation to Claudy, and the fact that the brothers and Dobroshi discussed at length the language in which she would speak to her fetus, settling on French, testifies to the importance of this new language. Lorna's silence is not weak, but troubling, infecting the configuration of the world with a sense of malaise.
12. Here the Dardennes exemplify a non-absurdist version of Simon Critchley's reading of Samuel Beckett's Film, in which Critchley sees an ‘ethics of courage’ linked to a difficult recommencing (returning us to passing time): ‘Existence is shaped by a movement of flight or evasion that tries to escape that existence, a movement that fails and one begins again, on commence, on recommence. How is it? Comment c'est? It is to begin, commencer. For me this is the core of the ethic of courage that defines Beckett's work’ (Citation2007, 116).
13. One could interpret this quality as a delicate correction to Levinas's use of metaphors like the feminine and the maternal, which have come under attack from feminist readers ranging from Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Catherine Chalier and others. A major problem is that Levinas's feminine is defined as passive and ahistorical: she cannot teach; she only welcomes; she is not herself capable, it would seem, of ethical agency. At times she is but an object to caress, a necessary passage toward a future in fecundity. When maternity appears, it is only in the utopia of the ethical relation. Limiting women to this frictionless universe denies their historical existence. However, the film, giving Lorna a concrete historical and political identity, actually stays more faithful to Levinas's ethical vision. For Levinas, peace must continually work against essential being: rather than a denial, it is a suspension of essence, an unstable desynchronization of the mechanism of the world.
14. I am following Martha Nussbaum who applies the distinction to develop the notion of an ‘implied listener’ in music (Nussbaum Citation2001, 253).
15. I don't want to overstate Bazin's investment in deep focus. Some critics of Bazin have claimed that his theory holds up Welles, Wyler and Renoir as the completion of ‘cinema's stylistic development’ (Bordwell Citation1997, 59). Bordwell argues, convincingly, that depth of field has had many functions over the history of filmmaking. However, I see Bazin as self-consciously entrenched in a local debate about form and style rather than as a historian of film form. Bazin painstakingly opposes deep focus to an overemphasis on techniques of montage that closely follow dramatic or psychological logic. If anything, he overstates what is essentially a polemical argument.
16. For more on proximity in the Dardennes' work, see Mai (Citation2010, 53–63), and Cooper (Citation2007, 84–5) who argues convincingly that proximity brings the viewer close to the film without a sense of possession or experiencing the ‘characters' vision’.