Rosetta

27/04/2025

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Affecting the Performance

 What is realism? According to Andre Bazin vital to it was the 'ontological ambiguity of reality' and that film had a duty to the ambiguousness of life in the images it recorded. The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities." ('The Ontology of the Photographic Image') This countered what many believed was important to film: since it was so closely affiliated with reality, shouldn’t cinema focus on how it could manipulate the real for its own specific aesthetic ends? We needn’t spend too much time rehearsing old debates. But while much has understandably been made of the Dardenne brothers’ film Rosetta, as one that extended the possibilities of realism into the intensity of on-screen space, as one that limited the mise en scene to focus on the immediacy of the bodies within the camera’s purview, we can speak first about the film’s relationship with ambiguity. 

           In several scenes, the film shows us the title character suffering from stomach pains but we never find out what causes them, with some critics reading them as menstrual cramps. Scott Tobias talks of Rosetta's “period cramps” (The Reveal), TV Tropes agreeing, and Wikipedia also taking for granted this is the cause of the suffering. Others have read it more ambiguously, with Rhys Graham referring to her “mysterious stomach pains” (Senses of Cinema) and some hazarding a guess. Roger Ebert says she has “stomach pains, maybe from an ulcer.” (RogerEbert.Com) The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant insists this is what it is, saying Rosetta “is being eaten alive by an ulcer that cramps her up.” ('Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta') Yet we don’t know for sure what she is suffering from, and this is part of the film’s ambiguity with reality that allows for the various assumptions offered. 

           When Rosetta (Emilie Dequinne) befriends a boy close to her age who sells waffles from a stand, she shows him where she catches fish near the campsite and he falls in. Does she push him? It is hard to say as the camera is positioned tightly enough for her perhaps to have slipped, perhaps not. We might assume the former when she initially makes no effort to save him from the muddy river, only after a minute and many pleas from Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione) does she grab a large stick from the woods and help him. Later, she will say she slipped, but we don’t know if she is telling the truth. The scene where Riquet looks like he might drown shares similarities with an earlier one where Rosetta and her mother are grappling next to the river, and the mother accidentally pushes Rosetta into the water. The mum runs away, keen it seems to escape her daughter’s clutches rather than trying to drown her. Rosetta struggles for a few moments but manages to pull herself out. If she pushed Riquet in, hoping he would drow,n this would be so she could take his job as a waffle seller, and the film makes clear Rosetta will do almost anything to find work. Yet if she could escape without help, why wouldn’t the stronger Riquet be able to do so as well? As a premeditated act, it seems unlikely to be successful; as an accident that she chooses not to rectify, she can but hope he would drown. Rosetta's thinking is as ambiguous as the deed. 

        The altercation with her mother is partly over the mother’s alcoholism, with the booze she receives paid for by offering sexual services to men, including the one who runs the camping site where they are living, and where they exist in a drafty caravan. “All you think about are drinking and fucking” Rosetta yells at her mother. These are claims we can see as justifiable even if the Dardennes are elliptical in their revelation: we see Rosetta arriving home and the mum is with a man next to her in the caravan, and later we see Rosetta witnessing her mum looking like she has just finished administering fellatio to the campsite boss. His belt is unbuckled, her head at the height for such an encounter. There are signs, too, of a drinking habit: asleep, slumped against the caravan; empty beer bottles found next to it. Rosetta’s cruel claim about her mother isn’t inaccurate, even if the events that reveal the justification for the remark remain elliptically presented.

            Ambiguity and ellipsis are not the same thing, even if they are synonyms, and they are frequently not a feature of realism. They are often a central element of art cinema as David Bordwell defines it. In a mini-chapter within ‘Art Cinema as Mode of Film Practice’, ‘Realism, Authorship, Ambiguity’, Bordwell reckons that art film usually defines itself outside Hollywood practices and that ambiguity is central to this. As he says: “Put crudely, the slogan of art cinema might be: 'When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity.'" But films like Last Year at Marienbad, Gertrud and Breathless are far from realistic works. Bordwell may see ambiguity in Neo-realism, but Bicycle Thieves is far more assertively clear than Rosetta wishes to be. The elliptical, like ambiguity, is perhaps more often used as a formal device: the sort of match cuts that showing a passage of time in Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey; the elided action in a Bresson film such as L’Argent, or in a different way in a Hitchcock film: a key killing in Frenzy, where the camera retreats down the stairs rather than going into the apartment to witness the murder taking place. It is often more generally used in either a montage sequence as months pass or in classic Hollywood to elide sex and violence.  

      Most of these approaches rely on editing, but Rosetta chiefly offers the elliptical through point of view and limited mise en scene. Since we usually stay very close to Rosetta’s perspective, the film won’t crosscut or offer an establishing shot to show the full content of the sequence. It uses ambiguity and ellipsis to achieve Bazin’s ontological ambiguity while generating a realism that is quite distinct from its earlier manifestations in Neo-realism or the more theatrically-oriented British Kitchen sink realism.  “We didn’t want complicated camera movement", the brothers insisted. "We wanted the camera close on the actor, close on the emotions. We are empiric cinematographers” (Film Ireland). Yet Rosetta also coincided with developments in film technology and aesthetic preoccupations. Berlant for example is one of the key theorists of affect, of the world as immediate and intimate rather than aloof and analytic. As Berlant says: “My interest was in discovering how we register affect as a kind of belated experience.” (Extra/Extra) It is a good way of describing Rosetta as a character and also the film’s approach, with intimacy of experience more important than registering information.

          Most films are involved in this trade-off between information and affect, with the viewer finding out what happens next chiefly because we are following characters who are either seeking information they don’t know, or are at the very least in a temporal world that is developing with them at the centre of it. There is a great difference between a Bond film where 007 seeks out the villain, and a character having various adventures in Rome in La Dolce Vita. Nevertheless, the viewer wants to know what will come next in the immediate narrative future. Even if the filmmaker doesn’t anticipate events (crosscutting to warn the viewer what awaits them as the baddie hides in the closet; showing the sniper on the roof waiting to fire), they are likely at least to create anticipation in the viewer as one wonders who the villain happens to be in Goldfinger, and how Bond will find him, or if the main figure in La Dolce Vita will be able to give up his aimless existence and devote himself to writing. While Bond and Marcello might have a few things in common (women, cars and the good life) within the enormous differences of cinematic style, the films will look more like each other formally than they look like Rosetta. 

    This rests on a privileged perspective that proposes the camera can travel far beyond the character’s perceptions, but a combination of technological developments and the affective interest Berlant and others see as important to understanding embodied worlds helps create the type of aesthetic the Dardennes adopt. By the late 1990s, digital became increasingly an option. While the directors used instead a 16mm celluloid camera, the ever lighter equipment and the absorption of the digital or digitally-inflected aesthetic, evident in anything from Danish Dogme films to American horrors like The Blair Witch Project, acclimatised viewers to a style that might have been deemed acceptable in documentary but usually resisted in fiction film before then. Into the early 2000s, it became a common style, even a tic, whatever the camera used. We see it in Bloody Sunday, Ivans Extc, Full Frontal and others: a grainy disregard for clarity of action for intense immediacy. The viewer was no longer observing a frame; they were caught in its disintegration as the character became the focal point of the mise en sene to the detriment of the surrounding screen space. While before the ellipsis had been dictated by the cut, it then became no less evident in the filmed space, which also often created ambiguity and thus gave realism a whole new look. 

         After Rosetta helps Riquet out of the water, she betrays him all over again by telling the boss he is selling his own waffles under the counter. The boss removes him from the job and Rosetta gets to take his place. After her shift, we hear the revving of a moped (they often feature in the Dardennes’ early work), and we would usually expect a cut to where the noise is coming from. Instead, the directors hold on Rosetta’s face as she looks offscreen, then we follow her while she tries to escape. Riquet enters and exits the frame based on Rosetta’s movements through space as the film never cuts to his presence. This is in its way a chase sequence, and while the Dardennes have a few of these in their work as well (usually with the moped), they avoid what is most common to them: the crosscut. One reason why the frame disintegrates rests on the first-person realism the film insists upon. When Rosetta thinks she has escaped up a steep, muddy hill that Riquet’s moped can’t climb, she sees him a minute later still in pursuit. The camera glances across from Rosetta's perspective and all but loses the image's composition. The elliptical no longer shows the confidence in the cut, exemplified in Kubrick’s brilliant bone-to-spaceship match in 2001, it can seem almost haphazard, an attempt to convey information the camera desperately tries to pick up.

           Speaking of their first feature, Je Pense a vous, made in the early nineties, the brothers said they were caught in a conventional way of making films and knew they had to start again. Looking at scenes from this first feature, it offers shot/counter shots, establishing shots, reaction shots, point of view shots and non-diegetic music. While the film might not be as bad as they claim, it does nothing to reinvigorate realism, no matter if it shows in subject matter the issues that are vital to it: the central character loses his job as a steelworker. Yet the form does no more than illustrate the subject; it doesn’t find a tension between new social problems and new ways to show them. It is ironicthat  characters like Rosetta will be caught in precarious jobs or remain unemployed because technology has moved on and moved elsewhere; yet there it is in another manifestation with the equipment filmmakers can use to make their work on lower budgets and get much closer to the characters they depict. Technology may have robbed the working class of their work, but technological advances can add texture to depicting their presence. 

        It is all very well showing sympathy to the materially impoverished, but an aloof, conventional film grammar can leave them as marginal figures within a frame that is always much more important than their presence. Rosetta wasn’t so cheap (about $2m according to Indiewire, and with over 60 hours of footage shot). However, its style became acceptable enough for filmmakers to offer a similar one on lower budgets — including films in the Romanian new wave, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and 12:08 East of Bucharest. What this new realism offered was usually a closer proximity to character: it became, if you like, cinematically proletarian rather than aesthetically aristocratic. The characters were no longer framed by a camera observing their actions from afar; the camera interacted with their emotional needs from up close. 

          Cinema perhaps found the equivalent of what Scottish writer James Kelman has called the 'I-Voice', where you can “obtain that great immediacy of the I-Voice….to obliterate the narrator, get rid of the artist, so all that’s left is the story.” (The Edinburgh Review) It is out of this cinematic equivalent of the I-Voice, the film offers its ambiguities and its ellipses. Kelman’s claim isn’t quite the same as first-person narrative, and if so, there wouldn’t be much use in proposing it is much of an innovation - it is more about the immediacy of experience. When film has tried to get closer to experience using the literary equivalent of first-person it hasn’t worked: Lady in the Lake, for example, used it throughout, and Dark Passage offered it for the film’s first section as central to the plot. But it never became central to cinematic technique, and nor did direct-to-camera address. These are probably the closest equivalents to first-person in cinema taken literally, but the Dardennes and others found it needed a different form of immediacy. They discovered it in assuming the actor’s body was the generator of the shot’s meaning, and the camera could stay very close to it and allow the ambiguities and ellipses to come out of this fact. However, this isn’t only a formal problem it resolved but also coincided with a social one it needed to comprehend. Bazin’s ideas came out of post-war Europe, and the assumptions behind that moment were a mixed-economy model based on high taxation and wealth distribution. People weren’t expected to fend for themselves but were involved in an interconnected social environment based on protectionism, which was human as readily as financial. The neo-realist films proposed a better world whatever the limitations of the characters within their own, and partly why the movement's chief screenwriter Cesare Zavattini insisted “the cinema’s overwhelming desire to see, to analyse, its hunger for reality, is an act of concrete homage towards other people, towards what is happening and existing in the world.” (Film: A Montage of Theories) But what does the 21st-century social conscience cinema need? Perhaps a Neo-realism to match neo-liberalism and thus a different aesthetic. As Berlant says of Rosetta and the directors’ prior film La Promesse: "an all too present cause of the effects these films track is the volatile here and now of that porous domain of hyperexploitive entrepreneurial atomism that has been variously dubbed globalisation, liberal sovereignty, late capitalism, post-Fordism, or neoliberalism.” ('Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta')Rather than the socially coherent Bicycle Thieves, we have the humanly atomised individual in ever more isolated acts of competition. The bicycle may now have become a moped, but this hardly indicates greater prosperity, no matter technological evolution. If the gains aren’t shared, society becomes ever more fractured, and film needs a form reflecting this. Rosetta is surely such a film. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Rosetta

Affecting the Performance

 What is realism? According to Andre Bazin vital to it was the 'ontological ambiguity of reality' and that film had a duty to the ambiguousness of life in the images it recorded. The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities." ('The Ontology of the Photographic Image') This countered what many believed was important to film: since it was so closely affiliated with reality, shouldn’t cinema focus on how it could manipulate the real for its own specific aesthetic ends? We needn’t spend too much time rehearsing old debates. But while much has understandably been made of the Dardenne brothers’ film Rosetta, as one that extended the possibilities of realism into the intensity of on-screen space, as one that limited the mise en scene to focus on the immediacy of the bodies within the camera’s purview, we can speak first about the film’s relationship with ambiguity. 

           In several scenes, the film shows us the title character suffering from stomach pains but we never find out what causes them, with some critics reading them as menstrual cramps. Scott Tobias talks of Rosetta's “period cramps” (The Reveal), TV Tropes agreeing, and Wikipedia also taking for granted this is the cause of the suffering. Others have read it more ambiguously, with Rhys Graham referring to her “mysterious stomach pains” (Senses of Cinema) and some hazarding a guess. Roger Ebert says she has “stomach pains, maybe from an ulcer.” (RogerEbert.Com) The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant insists this is what it is, saying Rosetta “is being eaten alive by an ulcer that cramps her up.” ('Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta') Yet we don’t know for sure what she is suffering from, and this is part of the film’s ambiguity with reality that allows for the various assumptions offered. 

           When Rosetta (Emilie Dequinne) befriends a boy close to her age who sells waffles from a stand, she shows him where she catches fish near the campsite and he falls in. Does she push him? It is hard to say as the camera is positioned tightly enough for her perhaps to have slipped, perhaps not. We might assume the former when she initially makes no effort to save him from the muddy river, only after a minute and many pleas from Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione) does she grab a large stick from the woods and help him. Later, she will say she slipped, but we don’t know if she is telling the truth. The scene where Riquet looks like he might drown shares similarities with an earlier one where Rosetta and her mother are grappling next to the river, and the mother accidentally pushes Rosetta into the water. The mum runs away, keen it seems to escape her daughter’s clutches rather than trying to drown her. Rosetta struggles for a few moments but manages to pull herself out. If she pushed Riquet in, hoping he would drow,n this would be so she could take his job as a waffle seller, and the film makes clear Rosetta will do almost anything to find work. Yet if she could escape without help, why wouldn’t the stronger Riquet be able to do so as well? As a premeditated act, it seems unlikely to be successful; as an accident that she chooses not to rectify, she can but hope he would drown. Rosetta's thinking is as ambiguous as the deed. 

        The altercation with her mother is partly over the mother’s alcoholism, with the booze she receives paid for by offering sexual services to men, including the one who runs the camping site where they are living, and where they exist in a drafty caravan. “All you think about are drinking and fucking” Rosetta yells at her mother. These are claims we can see as justifiable even if the Dardennes are elliptical in their revelation: we see Rosetta arriving home and the mum is with a man next to her in the caravan, and later we see Rosetta witnessing her mum looking like she has just finished administering fellatio to the campsite boss. His belt is unbuckled, her head at the height for such an encounter. There are signs, too, of a drinking habit: asleep, slumped against the caravan; empty beer bottles found next to it. Rosetta’s cruel claim about her mother isn’t inaccurate, even if the events that reveal the justification for the remark remain elliptically presented.

            Ambiguity and ellipsis are not the same thing, even if they are synonyms, and they are frequently not a feature of realism. They are often a central element of art cinema as David Bordwell defines it. In a mini-chapter within ‘Art Cinema as Mode of Film Practice’, ‘Realism, Authorship, Ambiguity’, Bordwell reckons that art film usually defines itself outside Hollywood practices and that ambiguity is central to this. As he says: “Put crudely, the slogan of art cinema might be: 'When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity.'" But films like Last Year at Marienbad, Gertrud and Breathless are far from realistic works. Bordwell may see ambiguity in Neo-realism, but Bicycle Thieves is far more assertively clear than Rosetta wishes to be. The elliptical, like ambiguity, is perhaps more often used as a formal device: the sort of match cuts that showing a passage of time in Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey; the elided action in a Bresson film such as L’Argent, or in a different way in a Hitchcock film: a key killing in Frenzy, where the camera retreats down the stairs rather than going into the apartment to witness the murder taking place. It is often more generally used in either a montage sequence as months pass or in classic Hollywood to elide sex and violence.  

      Most of these approaches rely on editing, but Rosetta chiefly offers the elliptical through point of view and limited mise en scene. Since we usually stay very close to Rosetta’s perspective, the film won’t crosscut or offer an establishing shot to show the full content of the sequence. It uses ambiguity and ellipsis to achieve Bazin’s ontological ambiguity while generating a realism that is quite distinct from its earlier manifestations in Neo-realism or the more theatrically-oriented British Kitchen sink realism.  “We didn’t want complicated camera movement", the brothers insisted. "We wanted the camera close on the actor, close on the emotions. We are empiric cinematographers” (Film Ireland). Yet Rosetta also coincided with developments in film technology and aesthetic preoccupations. Berlant for example is one of the key theorists of affect, of the world as immediate and intimate rather than aloof and analytic. As Berlant says: “My interest was in discovering how we register affect as a kind of belated experience.” (Extra/Extra) It is a good way of describing Rosetta as a character and also the film’s approach, with intimacy of experience more important than registering information.

          Most films are involved in this trade-off between information and affect, with the viewer finding out what happens next chiefly because we are following characters who are either seeking information they don’t know, or are at the very least in a temporal world that is developing with them at the centre of it. There is a great difference between a Bond film where 007 seeks out the villain, and a character having various adventures in Rome in La Dolce Vita. Nevertheless, the viewer wants to know what will come next in the immediate narrative future. Even if the filmmaker doesn’t anticipate events (crosscutting to warn the viewer what awaits them as the baddie hides in the closet; showing the sniper on the roof waiting to fire), they are likely at least to create anticipation in the viewer as one wonders who the villain happens to be in Goldfinger, and how Bond will find him, or if the main figure in La Dolce Vita will be able to give up his aimless existence and devote himself to writing. While Bond and Marcello might have a few things in common (women, cars and the good life) within the enormous differences of cinematic style, the films will look more like each other formally than they look like Rosetta. 

    This rests on a privileged perspective that proposes the camera can travel far beyond the character’s perceptions, but a combination of technological developments and the affective interest Berlant and others see as important to understanding embodied worlds helps create the type of aesthetic the Dardennes adopt. By the late 1990s, digital became increasingly an option. While the directors used instead a 16mm celluloid camera, the ever lighter equipment and the absorption of the digital or digitally-inflected aesthetic, evident in anything from Danish Dogme films to American horrors like The Blair Witch Project, acclimatised viewers to a style that might have been deemed acceptable in documentary but usually resisted in fiction film before then. Into the early 2000s, it became a common style, even a tic, whatever the camera used. We see it in Bloody Sunday, Ivans Extc, Full Frontal and others: a grainy disregard for clarity of action for intense immediacy. The viewer was no longer observing a frame; they were caught in its disintegration as the character became the focal point of the mise en sene to the detriment of the surrounding screen space. While before the ellipsis had been dictated by the cut, it then became no less evident in the filmed space, which also often created ambiguity and thus gave realism a whole new look. 

         After Rosetta helps Riquet out of the water, she betrays him all over again by telling the boss he is selling his own waffles under the counter. The boss removes him from the job and Rosetta gets to take his place. After her shift, we hear the revving of a moped (they often feature in the Dardennes’ early work), and we would usually expect a cut to where the noise is coming from. Instead, the directors hold on Rosetta’s face as she looks offscreen, then we follow her while she tries to escape. Riquet enters and exits the frame based on Rosetta’s movements through space as the film never cuts to his presence. This is in its way a chase sequence, and while the Dardennes have a few of these in their work as well (usually with the moped), they avoid what is most common to them: the crosscut. One reason why the frame disintegrates rests on the first-person realism the film insists upon. When Rosetta thinks she has escaped up a steep, muddy hill that Riquet’s moped can’t climb, she sees him a minute later still in pursuit. The camera glances across from Rosetta's perspective and all but loses the image's composition. The elliptical no longer shows the confidence in the cut, exemplified in Kubrick’s brilliant bone-to-spaceship match in 2001, it can seem almost haphazard, an attempt to convey information the camera desperately tries to pick up.

           Speaking of their first feature, Je Pense a vous, made in the early nineties, the brothers said they were caught in a conventional way of making films and knew they had to start again. Looking at scenes from this first feature, it offers shot/counter shots, establishing shots, reaction shots, point of view shots and non-diegetic music. While the film might not be as bad as they claim, it does nothing to reinvigorate realism, no matter if it shows in subject matter the issues that are vital to it: the central character loses his job as a steelworker. Yet the form does no more than illustrate the subject; it doesn’t find a tension between new social problems and new ways to show them. It is ironicthat  characters like Rosetta will be caught in precarious jobs or remain unemployed because technology has moved on and moved elsewhere; yet there it is in another manifestation with the equipment filmmakers can use to make their work on lower budgets and get much closer to the characters they depict. Technology may have robbed the working class of their work, but technological advances can add texture to depicting their presence. 

        It is all very well showing sympathy to the materially impoverished, but an aloof, conventional film grammar can leave them as marginal figures within a frame that is always much more important than their presence. Rosetta wasn’t so cheap (about $2m according to Indiewire, and with over 60 hours of footage shot). However, its style became acceptable enough for filmmakers to offer a similar one on lower budgets — including films in the Romanian new wave, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and 12:08 East of Bucharest. What this new realism offered was usually a closer proximity to character: it became, if you like, cinematically proletarian rather than aesthetically aristocratic. The characters were no longer framed by a camera observing their actions from afar; the camera interacted with their emotional needs from up close. 

          Cinema perhaps found the equivalent of what Scottish writer James Kelman has called the 'I-Voice', where you can “obtain that great immediacy of the I-Voice….to obliterate the narrator, get rid of the artist, so all that’s left is the story.” (The Edinburgh Review) It is out of this cinematic equivalent of the I-Voice, the film offers its ambiguities and its ellipses. Kelman’s claim isn’t quite the same as first-person narrative, and if so, there wouldn’t be much use in proposing it is much of an innovation - it is more about the immediacy of experience. When film has tried to get closer to experience using the literary equivalent of first-person it hasn’t worked: Lady in the Lake, for example, used it throughout, and Dark Passage offered it for the film’s first section as central to the plot. But it never became central to cinematic technique, and nor did direct-to-camera address. These are probably the closest equivalents to first-person in cinema taken literally, but the Dardennes and others found it needed a different form of immediacy. They discovered it in assuming the actor’s body was the generator of the shot’s meaning, and the camera could stay very close to it and allow the ambiguities and ellipses to come out of this fact. However, this isn’t only a formal problem it resolved but also coincided with a social one it needed to comprehend. Bazin’s ideas came out of post-war Europe, and the assumptions behind that moment were a mixed-economy model based on high taxation and wealth distribution. People weren’t expected to fend for themselves but were involved in an interconnected social environment based on protectionism, which was human as readily as financial. The neo-realist films proposed a better world whatever the limitations of the characters within their own, and partly why the movement's chief screenwriter Cesare Zavattini insisted “the cinema’s overwhelming desire to see, to analyse, its hunger for reality, is an act of concrete homage towards other people, towards what is happening and existing in the world.” (Film: A Montage of Theories) But what does the 21st-century social conscience cinema need? Perhaps a Neo-realism to match neo-liberalism and thus a different aesthetic. As Berlant says of Rosetta and the directors’ prior film La Promesse: "an all too present cause of the effects these films track is the volatile here and now of that porous domain of hyperexploitive entrepreneurial atomism that has been variously dubbed globalisation, liberal sovereignty, late capitalism, post-Fordism, or neoliberalism.” ('Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta')Rather than the socially coherent Bicycle Thieves, we have the humanly atomised individual in ever more isolated acts of competition. The bicycle may now have become a moped, but this hardly indicates greater prosperity, no matter technological evolution. If the gains aren’t shared, society becomes ever more fractured, and film needs a form reflecting this. Rosetta is surely such a film. 


© Tony McKibbin