Dardenne & Dardenne: La Promesse (The Promise) (1996)

Before The Promise, the Dardennes had largely confined themselves to documentaries, and their breakout feature is more a distillation of documentary than a departure from it. Based on many of the themes and figures of their earlier works, it centres on the plight of undocumented workers in the Belgian town of Seraing, and how it impacts a young Belgian boy and his father. At one level, it operates as a surrogate documentation, a straightforward depiction of people who are officially invisible or non-existent. However, the Dardennes strive to evoke the conditions for labour as much as the conditions of labour – their mobile camera segues into the wind corridors of Seraing to beautifully embody the kinetic flux from which all labour emerges and into which all labour returns. As a result, there’s something powerfully undifferentiated about the film’s vision of labour – keeping their narrative loose and their cinematography blank, the Dardennes make it impossible to extract the labour of any one actor or object, leaving no place for the eye to settle or call home. It’s as if the moment at which labour recognises itself as such is already an alienated moment, even as it enables self-knowledge. And that paradox produces a kind of self-immolating labour-image: caught between imaging labour and participating in it, documenting and undocumenting, the film’s never quite a film, or never quite exclusively a film. And that, in turn, is what offsets its apparent pessimism – there’s a confidence, here, that the amount of labour-power in the universe is constant. It might be transformed from one form into another or transferred from one party to another, but those processes are mutable and reversible. Converting their film into something else, then, allows the Dardennes to release a quantum of labour, the sparks of a welder, turning Seraing into a fleeting portal to the vast labour-power of the cosmos.