An Ending Deferred

Cyril on His Bicycle in Le gamin au vélo

A boy of about twelve years old on a bicycle. He rides as fast as he can. In sheer desperation, he has just violently robbed two people. The whole world is on his heels and is about to catch up with him, no matter how fast he rides.

But the camera continues to follow him effortlessly in one smooth movement. It seems to make no particular effort to keep up with this boy on the run, and the boy, for his part, makes no attempt to escape the frame. For the full duration of this uninterrupted shot, lasting almost a minute and a half, boy and camera, body and image, are attuned to one another.

Why does this shot, for me, point to an unmistakable freedom? What conception of freedom would be relevant here? And why might cinema be the privileged medium to make manifest such freedom?

The freedom of Cyril, as the boy is called, has nothing to do with the traditional, liberal notion of self-determination. That notion presupposes the capacity to control one’s own fate—or, expressed negatively, not to be controlled by it. For that reason, this concept of freedom is inseparably linked to a notion that seems, at first glance, to stand in opposition to it: the economic notion of possession and appropriation. According to the traditional, liberal understanding of self-determination, someone who is truly free is able, to a certain extent, to appropriate their own lifeworld. Having agency, according to this traditional liberal view, means that this lifeworld, including the things and bodies that belong to it, becomes somewhat pliable and flexible, able to bend and adapt like a tool of use to one’s own desires and wishes.

According to this liberal conception, Cyril is unfree. He is by no means master of his own fate. At the start of the film, Cyril lives in a foster home. It soon becomes clear that his father, the only parent present, has abandoned him to his fate. The boy has hardly any room to make decisions for himself and walks straight into the arms of a ruthless criminal. His own desires and wishes seem to count for little. Nothing in his lifeworld can be bent or truly appropriated. Even Cyril’s bicycle is sold without hesitation when his father finds himself short of money.

Moreover, this film, like the entire oeuvre of the Dardenne brothers, rejects the romantic cliché that those who lack material possessions are thrown back onto a single remaining possession: their own body. The protagonists of the Dardenne films, from the exploited workers in La promesse to the young mothers in Jeunes mères, and thus also the twelve-year-old Cyril in Le gamin au vélo, do not even possess their own bodies. The socio-economic injustices addressed by the Dardenne brothers make their way into the very intimacy of bodies that are constantly working and producing. In the process, these bodies are gradually consumed and worn down by forces (social, economic, political, material, psychological, existential) that exceed them. The films of the Dardenne brothers make clear that the bourgeois notion that each individual owns a unique, personal body is in reality the ideological breeding ground of, rather than an effective counterweight to, the reduction of that body to a commodity. Because it cloaks itself in purely economic terms, the conception of the human body as individual property always risks going hand in hand with social exploitation.

If a certain freedom nonetheless becomes visible in the images of Cyril cycling away, it therefore cannot be described with notions such as self-determination and appropriation. It would be a mistake to think that by cycling away at great speed Cyril finally appropriates his fate, as if he were taking possession of his own life and regaining his agency. Such a cathartic moment runs counter to the radicalism and the social agenda of the films of the Dardenne brothers. Moreover, the viewer is all too aware that this boy is riding nowhere. For him, there seems to be no place anywhere in the world. His flight therefore lacks any possibility of arrival.

Above all, the freedom of the fleeing Cyril has to do with the possibility of a very different relationship to the lifeworld, and especially to the things and bodies within it. Among others, Walter Benjamin has pointed to the capacity of a body to continue interacting with external forces that act upon it, without ever allowing itself to be fully mastered by them. In a number of fragments about circus performers, Benjamin describes how precisely such a bodily “dislocation” can give rise to an unexpected freedom. A trained juggler such as Enrico Rastelli, he writes, does not rule over his body as over a piece of individual property but allows “each of his limbs to act according to its own rationality”: “the will once and for all hands over its power to the body [and] surrenders itself in favor of the organs, the hand for example.” This means “that neither body nor ball fall ‘under [Rastelli’s] dominion,’ but that ‘the two, behind his back, come to an agreement.’”1 When a body interacts in such a spontaneous way with another body or thing-in-the-world, there is no longer a “self” directing the body like a well-oiled machine. Rather, the circus performer’s body opens itself to moments, movements, and experiences that cannot be entirely controlled, yet through which it can still find its own way. Such a free interaction no longer revolves around the voluntaristic fulfillment of one’s inner wishes or desires, but around the speed and dexterity with which a body manages to respond to unexpected circumstances: “the suspension of inner strivings and of the central position of the body.”2

Of course, with the circus we have moved miles away from the universe of the Dardenne films: the exhausted Cyril naturally has very little in common with a juggling acrobat. But for Benjamin this bodily decentering, speed, and dexterity are by no means a marginal matter in late modern society, let alone a question of mere entertainment. He explicitly relates them to the bodily dispossession produced by the late-capitalist “regime of property.” Benjamin sees this dispossession at work, among other places, in the animated films of Mickey Mouse. According to him, the Mickey Mouse films “show for the first time … that someone’s arm, indeed one’s own body, can be stolen.”3

For that reason, Mickey Mouse films undeniably have something “mechanizing” and “dehumanizing” about them. The films of Charlie Chaplin, which exerted a strong influence on the work of the Dardenne brothers, and not least on Le gamin au vélo, are understood by Benjamin from the same perspective. He rejects any “purely psychological” view of Chaplin and instead compares him to a “fairground marionette.” In Chaplin too, what stands out above all are unexpected, decentered bodily movements, or “a succession of small nervous impulses”: “Each of his individual movements consists of a series of jerky little partial movements.”4 As with Mickey Mouse, spontaneous bodily movements here prevail over individual will, emotion, and desire: human limbs present themselves as the components of a strange mechanism that operates on its own. Yet according to Benjamin these uncontrolled bodily movements are not merely alienating; they even contain the seed of resistance. In the circus performer, Mickey Mouse, and Chaplin alike, there emanates an enormous potential from such decentered and dispossessed bodies. These almost mechanical reactions reveal the stubbornness of bodies that ultimately have not allowed themselves to be completely subjugated by socio-economic exploitation. Even when someone’s will is broken, these bodies continue to react to that exploitation and therefore do not simply surrender. Thus Mickey Mouse is the “creature” that, despite all the opposing forces that try to destroy it, “continues to exist,” and Chaplin’s films are likewise characterized by the power to continually defer the “end.”5 For this very reason, Benjamin attributes to the physicality of both Mickey Mouse and Chaplin an almost emancipatory potential. He brings this intertwining of bodily alienation and resistance together in a striking image: “Despair, horror. The persistent search for a profound possibility of expressing this: the man whose chair is pulled away while he is sitting on it – continues to sit.”6

The boy for whom no place can be found anywhere in the world continues to ride. We return to Cyril and his bicycle, fleeing together through the streets of Seraing. This body and this object, too, should not be understood in a “purely psychological” way. The argument that the bicycle primarily symbolizes an emotional bond with his father, since it is he who gave Cyril the bike, is not very convincing. This bicycle is indeed a thoroughly material thing-in-the-world with which Cyril enters into a particular, physical relationship.

That relationship, as already suggested above, is not one of appropriation or control. The bicycle is not a possession, and in fact not even a mere tool used by Cyril. It almost seems to exert an active force of its own. The bicycle is not simply a pliable or adaptable instrument; rather, it seems to take over from Cyril when he himself can see no way out. In short, from the encounter between a bicycle and the body of a twelve-year-old boy there emerges a kind of physical stubbornness that shows that Cyril indeed, even when his will is broken, “continues to exist.” Here too the “end” not only repeatedly announces itself, but above all is repeatedly deferred.

The argument that the shot of the cycling Cyril carries within it an unmistakable freedom could end here. According to quite a number of prominent film theorists, cinema indeed shows us that true freedom is not a merely psychological category, let alone an economic one. Instead, they argue, freedom emerges from the realization that the physical interactions between human beings and the world contain inexhaustible possibilities. No other medium than film, they claim, succeeds better in bringing this potential for change to our attention. In his book Theory of Film (1960), Siegfried Kracauer even speaks in this context of a “redemption of physical reality.”7 By this he suggests that physical reality is both redeemed by the film image (because the film image reveals unsuspected possibilities and opportunities) and itself redemptive (because the potential that is shown is purely physical in nature and therefore has nothing to do with, for example, a belief in divine redemption). According to authors such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Vivian Sobchack, we primarily experience moving film images as moving bodies. In their rejection of purely symbolic, semiotic, and psychoanalytic interpretations, which emphasize disembodied signs and meanings, these authors likewise assume that the film image offers a direct presentation of the inexhaustible physical interactions between bodies, and between bodies and things. It takes little effort to place the images of the cycling Cyril within this framework. His surprising freedom can then be understood as deriving from the richness of possibilities, and the corresponding hope, with which our world would seem to be imbued.

Yet these interpretations fall short. Both “realist” (Kracauer) and “phenomenological” (Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack) film theories essentially understand cinema as a form of choreography, as if film ultimately revolved around the organization and presentation of moving bodies and things in space. In doing so, however, these theories overlook something essential. Cinema is not the art of organizing and representing physical reality in a particular way, but of recreating it as something that is itself no longer purely physical: an image. The differences between physical reality and a film image are evident, yet they are too often ignored. Unlike the physical outside world, a film image appears without depth and on something motionless: the projection or television screen displays only flat, two-dimensional images, and it does not itself move. Moreover, the film image is essentially bounded, both in space (every screen has an edge) and in time (with a simple press of the projector or television button, any film image will disappear). Because of these fundamental differences, no film image, no matter how realistic, is perceived as a fragment of physical reality or as a body in space. The medium of cinema is therefore particularly well suited to thinking physical reality in a certain way (for what is thought, after all, if not bringing something into a new context by recreating it as an image?), but not to representing that reality in its physical dimension.

The films of the Dardenne brothers may often be associated with cinéma vérité, yet they are fully aware of this difference between reality and the film image. Even though their films cannot be separated from tangible socio-economic realities, they do not invite the viewer to look through the image, as if it were nothing more than a window. Why would filmmakers, who are always also makers of images, wish the viewer to remain blind to the images they create? In Le gamin au vélo as well, the image pushes itself to the foreground at crucial moments, as if to indicate that this film, too, cannot exist without intrinsic formal qualities. These come to the surface, among other ways, through the use of music. Le gamin au vélo is the first film in which the Dardenne brothers incorporated music. The few seconds taken from Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous Piano Concerto No. 5 (Emperor) appear so abruptly, however, that, according to the filmmakers themselves, they remain “above the film actually.” The fact that the difference between the film’s formal qualities and the reality shown is heard and seen so explicitly is crucial. It is precisely in this way that the film points to what is missing in the reality being depicted. “For us,” the Dardenne brothers have said, “music represents everything that is missing to Cyril: love, tenderness, and consolation. [The music] is hovering, waiting, and the audience would like to see it enter the film.”8 One could therefore say that the aim of the Dardenne brothers is the very opposite of that of the “realist” or “phenomenological” cinema described by Siegfried Kracauer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or Vivian Sobchack. Film here does not present the supposedly inexhaustible richness of reality; rather, it seems to drain reality of it. The result is not a dynamic encounter with unexplored possibilities and presences, but a confrontation with impossibility and absence. The stubborn, physical “continuing to exist” of the cycling Cyril is therefore not, as such, an anchor point of hope.

It is precisely the distance between image and reality, a distance that is essential rather than gradual (again, this is not about the truthfulness of a film), that is, for a brief moment, bridged in the shot of the cycling boy, thereby suggesting, in my view, a form of freedom. Why is the distance the boy covers on his bicycle ultimately not physical in nature? First of all, cinema, unlike the choreography mentioned above, is only moderately suited to representing physical distance. The invention of cinema, like the invention of the train, is often described as a breakthrough in the time–space continuum, seemingly making it possible to travel through time and space. Yet the journey itself, that is, the act of bridging distance, was from the very beginning destined to escape the film image. It is no coincidence that one of the earliest films shows the arrival of a train rather than the train journey itself. During the first public screenings of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat in Lyon, the crossing of physical distance could only be truly felt by spectators who suddenly ducked at the sight of the oncoming train, those who therefore remained blind to the film images themselves. Because the screen we watch does not move and is bounded, film images can at best evoke the crossing of physical distance (for example, landscapes rushing past the window of a car or train, or an airplane cutting through the clouds), but they can never truly represent it. Moreover, the notion of “physical distance” is, in a sense, inherently contradictory. To bridge physical distance means traveling from one place to another. Yet the mere fact that both places exist within the same physical world already implies a certain proximity. When two places are situated on the same level, within the same reality, there exists a shared measure connecting them. Even a thousand kilometers is, in a sense, close. In such a case, genuine incongruity cannot exist.

The cycling Cyril, however, simultaneously exists in two fundamentally different realities: he is both body and image. The boy who flees on his bicycle in the Dardenne brothers’ film can be seen as the mirror image of the train that arrives in the Lumière brothers’ film: he rides into the image, not out of it. The physical movement of the cycling boy seems to coincide so completely with the formal qualities of the uninterrupted, flowing camera movement that, for several minutes, it appears as if he becomes one with the film image itself. In his analysis of Chaplin, Benjamin indeed already pointed to the surprising similarity between certain physical movements on the one hand and the very distinctive formal language of the film image on the other: Charlot’s bodily movements “elevate the law of the cinematic image sequence to the law of human motor activity.”9 Because the cycling Cyril is effortlessly followed by the camera, the two speeds, of the moving body and of the camera, neutralize each other out. In this way, a nearly natural, and indeed free, rhythm emerges, granting the fleeing boy, at least for several minutes, a kind of respite.

In the shot of the boy cycling away, the potential for the film’s astonishing final scene is already contained. When Cyril comes face to face with one of his victims, he flees. He ends up in a tree and falls several meters to the ground. We see his body lying motionless. Meanwhile, his pursuer has caught up with him. At last, after all. He wants to leave Cyril behind as dead. Cyril has now truly exhausted all real possibility. And then the image takes over from the reality shown: Cyril rises, seemingly unscathed.10 He walks away.

• 1

  Walter Benjamin, ‘Ibizenkische Folge,’ in Gesammelte Schriften. Band IV, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 406. [translation mine]

• 2

  Walter Benjamin, ‘Negativer Expressionismus,’ in Gesammelte Schriften. Band VI, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 132. [translation mine]

• 3

  Walter Benjamin, ‘Zu Micky-Maus’, in ibid., 144.

• 4

  Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band I, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 1040. [translation mine]

• 5

  Benjamin, ‘Zu Micky-Maus,’ 144 and Walter Benjamin, ‘Chaplin,’ in Gesammelte Schriften. Band VI, 138.

• 6

  Benjamin, ‘Negativer Expressionismus,’ 132 (my italics).

• 7

  Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).

• 8

  Ariston Anderson, “A Conversation with the Dardenne Brothers,” Filmmaker Magazine, 14 March 2012.

• 9

  Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band I, 1040.

• 10

  Compare Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma. Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard-Gaumont, 1998), 214: “The image will come at the time of the resurrection.”