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The introduction begins by exploring how Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy has been taken up by film theorists to date. Much of this scholarship centres on Levinas’s theories of the Other as found in Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), particularly the ‘face’ of the Other, which theorists have discussed in relation to visualre presentation. Levinas developed his ethics, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), into a performative account of what it feels like to be responsible for the Other. Accordingly, Performing Ethics through Film Style takes a similar approach with film, linking the performativity of Levinas’s writing style with the capacity of films to perform a Levinasian ethics of responsibility for the Other through their styles. The introduction brings in performativity theory – including J. L. Austin’s speech acts, Jacques Derrida’s originary performativity and Judith Butler’s theories of language in the socio-political sphere – to enhance this study of performativity in Levinas and film. And it sets up the subjects of the chapters to follow: the films of the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader. Studying these directors in relation to Levinas shows how films can perform ethics through a wide variety of styles.

Chapter 7 analyses American Gigolo (1980), Paul Schrader’s third film as a director, following on from Blue Collar (1978) and Hardcore (1979). In comparison with the styles of Blue Collar and Hardcore, American Gigolo, a romantic thriller focusing on the high-class gigolo Julian Kaye (Richard Gere), is stylistically ostentatious, positively exploding with flourishes such as elaborate camera movements, expressive lighting, abundant use of music and striking use of colour, all of which would come to recur throughout Schrader’s work, frequently in the 1980s and periodically thereafter. Drawing on Schrader’s own theoretical work on transcendental style, the chapter shows how analysing the film style of American Gigolo from a Levinasian perspective reveals the ethical drive of Julian’s relationship with his clients, before reflecting on what he gains ethically and what he loses ethically when he turns away from those clients towards a developing love affair with one particular person.

This chapter looks at two early Dardenne films, Je Pense à Vous (1992) and La Promesse (1996). The gap between these two films proved momentous in the Dardennes’ career, as they were able, after the critical, commercial and, in their eyes, personal failure of Je Pense à Vous, to rethink their approach to film style, which led to La Promesse, the true ‘beginning’ of their career as it is commonly known and their first explicit engagement with Levinas’s ethical philosophy. The chapter considers this radical change in film style to be akin to the distinction that J. L. Austin, in his lectures on performativity, makes between constative and performative uses of language, the first being description and the second being performance. The chapter begins by positing a parallel between the shifts in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy from the descriptions of Totality and Infinity to the literary performance of Otherwise than Being and the Dardennes’ reconfiguration of their style between Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse. This will show how, just as Levinas sought to clarify his ethics by deploying a more overtly performative style, so the Dardennes achieve a similar, Levinasian style in their filmmaking in La Promesse.

This third chapter shows, primarily through The Kid with a Bike (2011), how the Dardennes have evolved their film style in recent years and how we can read this in terms of an evolving approach to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and film. Whereas in earlier films such as La Promesse and Le Fils the style was relentlessly focused on a protagonist’s struggle to be ethical and involved abundant use of close-ups and fast movement so as to convey the character’s struggles largely through physical action, more recent Dardenne films have exhibited a somewhat less frantic style, deploying a number of more ‘conventional’ cinematic tropes, such as establishing shots, soundtrack music and a focus on a larger number of characters. The result is a change in focus, but not a reduction in ethical concerns. I relate this more conventionally classical use of film style to Judith Butler’s notion of ‘reinscription’, the reusing of linguistic terms for new socio-political ends. In doing so, I highlight the ways in which the Dardennes use this more classical film style to explore their Levinasian concerns in new ways, deploying classical cinematic tools so as to ‘reinscribe’ them as ethical with in their films’ fictional worlds.

Chapter 5 considers Barbet Schroeder’s English-language American true-life drama Reversal of Fortune (1990) and his French-language political documentary Terror’s Advocate (2007), two films about lawyers and legal systems. Desmond Manderson refers in his collection Essays on Levinas and Law: A Mosaic (2009) to the ‘mosaic’ of a Levinasian approach to the law, as, sceptical of legal systems but devoted to justice, Emmanuel Levinas posits an ethics that refuses to crystallise into a prescriptive view of how the law should work in respect of the Other. I argue that these two Schroeder films, with their multi-faceted, ‘mosaic-like’ styles and structures, perform this fractured Levinasian refusal to settle on a fixed, simplistic definition of the law’s purpose. I analyse Reversal of Fortune for its multiple story strands and the different visual styles Schroeder deploys to delineate them, along with elements of performance – especially from Jeremy Irons as Claus von Bülow – that complicate questions of otherness. In discussing the documentary Terror’s Advocate, I draw on Stella Bruzzi’s work on performative documentary (2006) to explore how Schroeder uses film style to perform both the bravado of the film’s protagonist, the real-life criminal lawyer Jacques Vergès, and the Levinasian ‘mosaic’ of the legal situations he surveys.

This chapter looks at Barbet Schroeder’s French-language film Maîtresse (1975), a film about sadomasochism that is also a love story. Schroeder films this potentially sensational subject matter in a matter-of-fact way, his camera calmly – though never coldly – observing the actions of the dominatrix (Bulle Ogier), her clients and her lover (Gérard Depardieu). The calmness of the visual style in this film speaks to what I am reading as a Levinasian openness to the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour, a calmness that performs an ethical acceptance of the Other. The chapter also explores Schroeder’s views on the power of the director and how he does all he can to refuse that power, and relates this to questions of directorial identity. It argues that Schroeder’s lack of an overt directorial identity is a part of what makes him a Levinasian director; in sacrificing his own sense of identity, he allows himself to be open, in a Levinasian way, to the Otherness of his filmic subjects.

This chapter considers Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), a biopic on the life of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, and uses three different styles – black and white for the past, realistic, gritty colour for the present and highly stylised colour and décor for dramatic stagings from his novels. This fusion of styles is fitting for the subject: Mishima lived his life as performance art, and Schrader’s uses of film style perform Mishima’s own tendency towards performance. This, the chapter argues, is a Levinasian approach to the subject on Schrader’s part, as the film is open to exploring Mishima’s Otherness. But this also creates a limit in the film, as the viewer becomes aware that the film is unable (necessarily, in a Levinasian sense) to get truly close to Mishima’s Otherness. To try to would be unethical; to fail to is paradoxically a Levinasian move, as it reinforces the Otherness that no portrait can hope to unlock.

In Otherwise than Being, Emmanuel Levinas talks of ethics state as being ‘a passivity more passive than all passivity’, the idea that we want nothing for ourselves and that this is what enables us to be devoted to the Other. The Paul Schrader films that this chapter analyses – The Comfort of Strangers (1990), adapted from the Ian McEwan novel, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008), from a novel by Yoram Kaniuk – focus on protagonists who are passive in their wants, desires and relationship with life, and my readings of these films will discuss Levinasian passivity and its ethical importance to film. These protagonists are affected by their passivity in different ways: Colin (Rupert Everett) in The Comfort of Strangers comes up against a man who wishes to murder him; Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) in Dominion faces off against Satan; Adam (Jeff Goldblum) in Adam Resurrected is fighting the trauma of his own persecuted past during the Holocaust and his present-day struggles to control his overactive but fractured sense of self. Schrader shows in these films that ethical engagement has passivity as a necessary component, and that passivity is perhaps the most demanding aspect of Levinas’s ethics.

This chapter shows that classical norms were not fixed rules or structures, but set particular boundaries within which innovation could take place. In essence, classical film style rejected formal techniques that were purposely disruptive or jarring to the audience. While it is sometimes implied that classical norms emerged simultaneously with the studio system, it is important to note that the aesthetic principles of classical Hollywood cinema preceded the studio system. The development of film style in this sense (classical norms) did not emerge in the very same historical instant as the mode of production that gave it institutional shape (the studio system). Instead, the relation between the two would develop a gradual symbiosis, such that classical norms would become synonymous with the studio system as it emerged more fully after the First World War. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Mass-produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood’ by Janet Staiger, which examines how production practices in the early 1910s influenced the way that films were developed and made.

Chapter 2 considers the Dardennes’ 2002 film Le Fils, a dramatic story of Levinasian responsibility for the Other based around a teacher and his pupil and a key exemplification of the Dardennes’ film style. It assesses the film in the light of Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘originary performativity’, as seen, for example, in his 1976 analysis of the American Declaration of Independence. Derrida argues that originary performativity occurs when a work performs its own creation – such as happened when the founding fathers of the United States signed a document that already spoke of an American people, a people who were brought into being by the very document that spoke of them. It is the power of an artwork to create a rupture in the order of the world, to originate a new type of world. This chapter reads the Dardennes’ use of style in Le Fils as a filmic type of originary performativity, both presenting the world as it is and showing a world as it could be. Through this, the film powerfully evokes a Levinasian responsibility for the Other as embodied in its protagonist, Olivier (Olivier Gourmet).

This chapter explores Barbet Schroeder’s violent and romantic Spanish-language Colombian drama Our Lady of the Assassins (2000). The film, based on the 1994 novel by Fernando Vallejo, tells the story of the love affair between a disillusioned middle-aged writer and a teenage gang member. Their relationship plays out against a backdrop of violence and tension in Medellín, Colombia. Schroeder’s approach to the subject stresses the normality of the relationship and the ordinariness of the violence. The result is a film that embraces a non-judgmental take on a type of relationship that movies are not accustomed to portraying. I argue that Schroeder’s work is akin to Emmanuel Levinas’s positioning of ethics as ‘first philosophy’, namely, that we are ethical before we are anything else. I draw in particular on Levinas scholar Adriaan T. Peperzak’s work to explore the implications of this, relating it to Schroeder’s film style in Our Lady of the Assassins.

The chapter examines the distinct aesthetic effects conveyed by the filmmaker’s stylistic and narrative choices in The Spanish Prisoner. Specifically, it argues that Mamet’s unusual aesthetic view relies on a use of film style that sits uneasily with the notion of classicism in American cinema. This is because, although narrative construction follows, for the most part, the basic principles of classical narrative (causal coherence, continuity and character motivation), it often departs from those principles and follows a logic of its own. These departures are mainly manifest in several clear breaks from the rules of social and/or cultural verisimilitude which immediately provide the story with a high degree of implausibility compared to a classical narrative. Equally, the film style employed to support such a narrative generally adheres to the rules of continuity and transparency, though, on several occasions, it also breaks those rules and consequently evokes a strong sense of constructedness and/or artificiality. In this respect, although film style is at the service of the narrative, it also comments on the narrative and breaks the spectator’s engagement with the story in ways that a classical style would never do.

The Conclusion sums up how studying Emmanuel Levinas and film in terms of style and performativity can expand our appreciation both of Levinas’s ethics and of the work of these significant filmmakers. This study of a range of films directed by the Dardenne brothers, Barbet Schroeder and Paul Schrader helps open up the different ways in which film style can perform ethics. This opening-up shows that there is no such thing as a singular ‘ethical style’ or ‘Levinasian style’ and no such thing as a singular ‘Levinasian topic’. Rather, the power and importance of Levinas’s ethics can be detected and explored in a range of subject matter and performed through a range of film styles. This realisation paves the way for other studies into ethics, performativity and film.

This chapter examines the relationship between modern mass culture and nationalism through an analysis of the cinema’s reflexivity toward the moviegoing experience itself. In this context, the chapter considers Shochiku Kamata Film Studios’ “Kamata style,” the foundation for the classical Japanese cinema, as the performative expression of Japanese modernity. The Kamata-style films presented a national identity by adapting the forms of ordinary domestic life and conciliated the audience with nationalism and militarism, especially in the 1930s. The chapter also discusses the interconnection between film style and cultural formations in Japanese society by focusing on the films of the director Shimazu Yasujiro, including My Neighbor, Miss Yae (Tonari no Yae-chan, 1934). Furthermore, it explores Shochiku’s use of high culture in the form of junbungaku (high literature) in an attempt to traverse the modernist boundaries between high and low culture. Finally, it details the compulsive desire of Japanese filmmakers to elevate their own social status, as manifested in the bifurcated view of interwar film critics toward the “West.”

This second part of the book takes the study of Emmanuel Levinas and film further into uncharted waters, by looking at Levinasian ethics in relation to films directed by Barbet Schroeder. Schroeder has made films in many different countries – such as France, Uganda, the United States, Colombia and Japan – on several different topics, and whereas the Dardennes have a recognisable style that they vary slightly from film to film, there is no such thing as an easily identifiable ‘Schroeder style’. This chapter reads this as a highly Levinasian dimension to Schroeder’s work: it argues that Schroeder’s lack of a consistent filmmaking identity initiates a highly flexible approach to his subject matter, his shifting styles responding open-mindedly and generously to the demands of different Others, and that his films therefore can be said to perform a Levinasian ethics through their different uses of film style. This introductory section sets up the discussions to follow on four Schroeder films: Maîtresse (1975), Reversal of Fortune (1990), Terror’s Advocate (2007) and Our Lady of the Assassins (2000).

Part 3 considers the work of director Paul Schrader. Schrader is not as intuitive a fit for Emmanuel Levinas as the Dardennes or even Schroeder: many of Schrader’s films focus on a lone figure struggling with his relationships with other people and with the world. As these relationships are so often violent, destructive or denied, ethical concerns often seem to be far away, and Schrader’s filmmaking – by turns visually dazzling, overtly stylised, and more low-key and contemplative, often within the course of a single film – muddies the ethical waters further, as it is unclear whether Schrader wants to stimulate our senses, excite us with violent drama or draw us into passivity. But this approach, the book argues, invites the audience to remain alert and involved, and, in doing so, kindles ethical awareness. Thus, Schrader’s uses of style, as much as those of the Dardennes and Schroeder, are examples of style performing ethics, just as Levinas does in his prose. This introductory section sets up the discussions to follow on five Schrader films: American Gigolo (1980), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) and Adam Resurrected (2008).

This chapter uses the case of dubbing practices in the early 1930s to consider the possibility that the impact of screen translation techniques on film aesthetics is more significant than has been recognised. The focus is on Hollywood’s unexpected adoption in 1931 of voice dubbing as its principal means of preparing films for the main foreign markets. Hollywood’s reliance on dubbing is contrasted with practices in the German film industry, its main rival for the world film market, where films for export were prepared in foreign-language versions rather than dubbed. Dubbing involved more than voice replacement to affect motion picture style in various ways. Trade press documentation is used to suggest that the dubbed American films of 1931 typically featured less speech; fewer close-ups of speaking actors; more reaction shots in dialogue scenes; more cuts overall; framings and props that concealed rather than displayed the actors’ moving lips; and other stylistic quirks.

This first part of the book looks at the work of the filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Dardenne brothers. It builds on the existing Levinasian ethical readings of their work – such as those by Sarah Cooper (2007), Joseph Mai (2010) and Philip Mosley (2013) – to show how a performativity-led approach to their work shines a new light on their films and their relationship to Levinas. It looks at Luc Dardenne’s own comments on the inspiration the Dardennes take from Levinas’s ethics and how this inspiration informs their film style. And it argues that it is fruitful to discuss their work in terms of performativity, as this will bring out how their uses of style enable their films to perform a Levinasian responsibility for the Other and a refusal to settle for easy solutions that would close down ethical engagement. Rather, their films invite the viewer to engage ethically with the characters through the directness and subjectivity of the film style. This introductory section sets up the discussions to follow on four Dardenne films: Je Pense à Vous (1992), La Promesse (1996), Le Fils (2002) and The Kid with a Bike (2011).