The poetry of idiots: Siegrid Alnoy, Lars von Trier, and Bruno Dumont

Abstract

Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998), Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité (1999), and Siegrid Alnoy's Elle est des nôtres (2003) all feature a protagonist who is both simple-minded and spiritual – an ‘idiot’, in the Dostoevskyan sense of the term. The present paper examines these ‘idiotic’ protagonists from three perspectives: the sociological – how is the idiot situated in relation to society? – the phenomenological – what characterizes the idiotic way of being in the world? – and the stylistic – what does this way of being in the world allow the director to do? Through integrating the three perspectives, the paper argues that the idiot serves to unframe social and cinematic conventions, offering spectators a phenomenological experience that opens them to a poetry which struggles to find a place in the contemporary world.