The archive, the auteur and the unfilmed film: Reflections on Dreyer’s and von Trier’s Medea

Abstract

Abstract This article engages with Lars von Trier’s 1988 television adaptation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s screenplay Medea to explore the concept of the unfilmed film. Beginning with von Trier’s adoption of Dreyer’s tuxedo, the article asks how the notions of auteurship and the archive itself produce the unfilmed film as ‘unrealized’, and probes the concept of the ‘unfinished’ film. Some examples of unfilmed films, and documentaries about them, are discussed as examples of archival practices in the mediation of unfinished, unrealized and unfilmed films, sometimes by directors themselves and sometimes by their successors. Dreyer’s research materials and methodologies for his screenplay Medea, preserved in the Danish Film Institute, are discussed as an intertext to the later adaptation for Danish television by Lars von Trier.