Skip to main content

_

Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Read more

Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


Labels

The son (Le fils 2002)




"The Son" is complete, self-contained and final. All the critic can bring to it is his admiration. It needs no insight or explanation. It sees everything and explains all. It is as assured and flawless a telling of sadness and joy as I have ever seen.

I agree with Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, that a second viewing only underlines the film's greatness, but I would not want to have missed my first viewing, so I will write carefully. The directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, do not make the slightest effort to mislead or deceive us. Nor do they make any effort to explain. They simply (not so simply) show, and we lean forward, hushed, reading the faces, watching the actions, intent on sharing the feelings of the characters.

Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a Belgian carpenter, supervises a shop where teenage boys work. He corrects a boy using a power saw.
A woman comes into the shop and asks Olivier if he can take another apprentice. No, he has too many already. He suggests the welding shop. The moment the woman and the young applicant leave, Olivier slips from the shop and, astonishingly, scurries after them like a feral animal and spies on them through a door opening and the angle of a corridor. A little later, strong and agile, he leaps up onto a metal cabinet to steal a look through a high window.





"The Son" is a great film. If you find you cannot respond to it, that is the degree to which you have room to grow. I am not being arrogant; I grew during this film. It taught me things about the cinema I did not know.

What did I learn? How this movie is only possible because of the way it was made, and would have been impossible with traditional narrative styles. Like rigorous documentarians, the Dardenne brothers follow Olivier, learning everything they know about him by watching him. They do not point, underline or send signals by music. There are no reaction shots because the entire movie is their reaction shot. The brothers make the consciousness of the Olivier character into the auteur of the film.

Olivier trains wards of the Belgian state--gives them a craft after they are released from a juvenile home. Francis (Morgan Marinne) was in such a home from his 11th to 16th years. Olivier asks him what his crime was. He stole a car radio.

"And got five years?" "There was a death." "What kind of a death?" There was a child in the car who Francis did not see. The child began to cry and would not let go of Francis, who was frightened and "grabbed him by the throat." "Strangled him," Olivier corrects.

"I didn't mean to," Francis says.






    1. Assault on Precinct 13 scored 7.3 out of 10 on IMDb.
      Assault on Precinct 13 scored 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.



Jean-Pierre &
Luc Dardenne

Masters of social realism. Architects of the "cinema of conscience."




https://gemini.google.com/share/14424d7c13a3



L'Enfant (The Child 2005) >>>







The film follows Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a dedicated carpentry instructor at a vocational training center for troubled youths in Belgium. His quiet, disciplined life is disrupted when a 16-year-old boy named Francis (Morgan Marinne) applies for an apprenticeship.







Cinematic Style: The "Dardenne" Look

The Dardennes utilize a specific aesthetic that forces the audience into an intimate, often uncomfortable proximity with the protagonist:

  • The "Neck" Camera: For a significant portion of the film, the camera follows Olivier from behind, focusing on the back of his neck and his shoulders. This creates a sense of "blind" empathy—we see exactly what he sees, but his face and internal thoughts remain an enigma.

  • Minimalism: There is no musical score. The "soundtrack" consists of the mechanical sounds of carpentry: the rasp of a saw, the hammering of nails, and the heavy breathing of the characters.

  • Physicality: Olivier Gourmet (who won Best Actor at Cannes for this role) gives a remarkably physical performance. His character is defined by his back brace, his precise movements with wood, and his labored breath, suggesting a man literally "stiffened" by his past trauma.






Labels:

Popular Posts