The Wallflower Press imprint of Columbia University Press has published THE CINEMA OF THE DARDENNE BROTHERS: RESPONSIBLE REALISM by Dr. Philip Mosley in its Director's Cuts series. Wallflower Press is a leading publisher of books on the cinema.
In conjunction with this publication, Dr. Mosley will introduce a screening of two films by the Belgian brothers, ROSETTA and THE SON, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on the afternoon of Saturday, March 2nd. This event also forms part of the DC Francophonie Festival 2013. A buffet dinner in honor of Dr. Mosley and this publication will be held in the evening courtesy of the Belgian Embassy.
The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema and have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age.
Dr. Mosley's volume analyzes the brothers' careers from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debuts as directors of fiction films in the late 1980s and early 1990s to their six major achievements from The Promise (1996) to The Kid with a Bike (2011), an oeuvre that includes two Golden Palms at the Cannes Film Festival for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005).
It argues that the ethical dimension of the Dardennes' work complements, rather than precludes, their sustained expression of a fundamental political sensibility.
Dr. Mosley is a professor of English and comparative literature at Penn State Worthington Scranton. He is the author of several literature translations, including Bruges-la-Morte, by Georges Rodenbach; The Intelligence of Flowers, by Maurice Maeterlinck; October Long Sunday, by Guy Vaes; Tea Masters, Teahouses, by Werner Lambersy; and The Book of the Snow, by Francois Jaqmin, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2008, he was awarded the Prix de la Traduction Litteraire by the French community of Belgium and is also the author of two other books on cinema: Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress and Split Screen: Belgian Cinema and Cultural Identity.
