Cinema, André Malraux famously reflected, is an art that is also an industry. Film, he might have added, is a gift that is also a commercial product. Filmmakers, individually and collectively, draw hungrily on a rich cultural heritage. Digesting it and working on it, they develop their own vision and style. They give back to cinematic tradition through implicit and explicit acknowledgement of their influences. But they also give forwards, as others respond to their work and enrich it through interpretations and responses that accrete to it and make it something more than what it might originally have been. Yet, as we know all too well, cinema is also thoroughly commercialised. An aggressive machinery of copyright works to ensure that films circulate only in approved ways and that the profits that accrue from their distribution and exhibition, through cinemas, DVDs or online streaming, return to those considered legitimate beneficiaries. At the same time, whenever films are successful, symbolic capital accrues to names associated with them, making future projects easier to finance and films and DVDs easier to sell. The unpaid labour of cinema spectators is an essential part of this reputational labour. Films give but they also take back.

The Dardenne brothers are not outside this broader pattern. Explicitly, in their writings and interviews, and implicitly, through the stylistic and other choices deployed in their films, they acknowledge their debt to those that have influenced them, whether it be film directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Ken Loach, Robert Bresson and Maurice Pialat or thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas (Dardenne 2005: 10, 27, 33, 106, 145). At the same time, their films offer a clear affective and intellectual gift to their audience in their capacity to move us and to make us think about non-destructive ways to live under a neoliberal order. Yet, the Dardennes are clearly also part of the business of cinema: leading European arthouse directors, their names attract money to films, promote festivals, fill cinemas and sell DVDS and video on demand. While they undeniably give something to us that defies reduction to monetary value, they participate in the commerce of authorship and of cinema more broadly.