Abstract

This paper takes Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s film Le Fils and its critical reception as an occasion to explore Gilles Deleuze’s proposition that cinema’s capacity to show belief in this world—as a secular corollary to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious belief as a leap of faith—is one avenue by which the medium might rediscover its pertinence after the demise of the movement-image. Previous interpretations of The Son have taken up the film’s connection with the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to argue that the film’s ethical stance rests in its allusion to and rejection of the conception of faith demonstrated in the Hebrew Bible...