HNAR-345: Films of Dardenne Brothers

This academic course probes meticulously the social, economic, political and naturalistic cinema of the Belgium brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. The Dardenne Brothers, writers, directors and producers have created a notable body of work to include documentary works and their narrative poetic realism. This courses fits into the analysis of cinema in the tradition of auteur study. That being a very important structure to study theoretical and formal issues of cinema via the chronological analysis of a body of work to observe and consider how a body of work takes place over a long period of time and to observe how its text influences and parallels history. The course will investigate The Dardenne Brothers magnum opus to include Rosetta, 1999, The Son, 2002 and several of their documentary works that come prior to their notable success in their narrative work. Issues of work, European economics along with political oversight of the individual immersed in social structures will be studied as they reveal themselves through the brother's cinematic form and language. The course will draw from issues in the ethics of structuring the documentary and its boundaries that lead such attempts at realism to confront or be uttered forth with visual poetics.