Luc Dardenne focuses on his work with his brother lean-Pierre, and in particular on their last film Le fils, and on the path which has led them to the mastery of new cinematographic practices. Dardenne touches on, in turn, the importance of the history and memory of struggles, changes in forms of engagement and of resistance, in the ethics of filming a body, the imbrication of technology in the search for the limits of their art.

In this paper we review certain cinematographic practices which, by inscribing a becoming minor into the production and reception of films, attest to a resistance to normalisation. We pay special attention to the ways in which problems of representing the minor and transmitting their experiences have been addressed in the works of Dardenne and in Pasolini’s poetic cinema. Each of these filmmakers have developed a true « minor cinema » where the body, by taking over language, becomes problematic.

Pasolini’s protean oeuvre focuses particularly on lives outside the conventional class system and its norms. This text examines how one might envisage the organization of the multitudes in light of the practices developed by Pasolini to treat these singular forms of life. It reveals the ethical coherency of the «free indirect discourse » that Pasolini deploys in the context of the ideological and linguistic normalization that emerged from Italian fascism and neocapitalism.

In order to understand the unease or discomfort I experienced during a performance of contemporary dance and theatre which tried to create a humorous sense of distance towards suffering, I reflect on several personal experiences in order to arrive at an understanding of public laughter. This theorization relies on an understanding of the singularity of our embodiment and our social development. This singularity can only be understood by relating it to the popular concepts of the grotesque body and ambivalent laughter, (...) which Bakhtin studied in Rabelais. (shrink)