Philip Mosley – författare

The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liege-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers' career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut 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.

The brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have established an international reputation for their emotionally powerful realist cinema. Inspired by their home turf of Liege-Seraing, a former industrial hub of French-speaking southern Belgium, they have crafted a series of fiction films that blends acute observation of life on the social margins with moral fables for the postmodern age. This volume analyses the brothers' career from their leftist video documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s through their debut 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.

Explores the historical evolution of Belgian cinema as well as its contemporary situation within the evolving contexts of global media and European unity.In presenting the first English language study of Belgian cinema, Split Screen explores the fascinating history of a cinema largely determined by linguistic division and beset by problems of cultural identity. This "split screen" characterizes the Belgian cinema, which has not received the critical praise that it deserves, despite the recent international successes of films like Toto the Hero, and the achievements of individual directors such as Henri Storck, André Delvaux, and Chantal Akerman. In surveying the evolution of Belgian cinema from its beginnings to the present day, Philip Mosley locates all the major feature films, describes the crucial intervention of the state in film production, and reveals undervalued Belgian traditions in documentary, in animation, in short films, and in a colonial cinema created partly by missionaries in the former Belgian Congo. Due to the political and economic transformations affecting Europe, the reforms of the Belgian state, and the increasing globalization of world media industries, Belgian cinema can now inscribe itself within new national and international contexts.