The Ethical and the Juridical in Reversal of Fortune and Terror’s Advocate

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.

Maîtresse: Direction without Domination

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.

Passivity and Responsibility in The Comfort of Strangers, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Adam Resurrected

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.

Levinasian Limits of Performativity in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

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.

Conclusion: Levinasian Films in the World

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.

Introduction

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).

Introduction

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).

Je Pense à Vous and La Promesse: From Describing to Performing

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.

Introduction

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).

American Gigolo and the Ethics of Falling in Love

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.